How many characters are needed to reconstruct a phylogeny?

Despite increased recent attention towards Bayesian phylogenetics and its applications in understanding macroevolutionary processes, it remains unclear how many discrete characters are needed to accurately estimate tree topologies in a Bayesian framework. This could be particularly relevant for morphological datasets used in phylogenetics, as they usually consist of few dozens to few hundreds of characters—orders of magnitude smaller than most molecular datasets. I designed a simulation study in the software RevBayes to explore how the number of sampled discrete characters affects accuracy and precision of Bayesian phylogenetic estimates, under various setups differing in number of taxa, average number of state changes per character (i.e., tree length), and number of states per character. Results indicate that between 100 and 500 variable characters are necessary to reach sufficient accuracy and precision of phylogenetic estimates for as low as 20 tips. All other parameters being equal,..., , # Dryad dataset

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.63xsj3vd8](10.5061/dryad.63xsj3vd8)

## Description of the data and file structure

This compressed file archive contains all data and scripts used in the simulation study, as well as scripts to check for MCMC convergence, calculate metrics of tree accuracy and precision, and to plot results.

### Files and variables

#### File: SupplementaryDataForSubmission.zip

**Description:** 

`data` folder: contains data files used for the simulation study

* `sim_trees` subfolder: Contains all trees used to simulated data, in Newick format. It is organized in additional subfolders depending on the number of taxa (tips) of the tree (5, 10, 20, 50, 100, or 200), and on the expected tree length (1, 3, or 10).
* `Ntaxa` subfolders: Contain all simulated datasets in Nexus format, divided by number of taxa (N = 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, or 200), and with additional subfolders depending on the expected tree length (1, 3, or 10) and on the number of states per char...,