Data from: Paleo-drainage basin connectivity predicts evolutionary relationships across three southeast Asian biodiversity hotspots

Understanding factors driving diversity across biodiversity hotspots is
critical for formulating conservation priorities in the face of ongoing
and escalating environmental deterioration. While biodiversity hotspots
encompass a small fraction of Earth’s land surface, more than half the
world’s plants and two-thirds of terrestrial vertebrate species are
endemic to these hotspots. Tropical Southeast Asia displays extraordinary
species richness, encompassing four biodiversity hotspots, though
disentangling multiple potential drivers of species richness is confounded
by the region’s dynamic geological and climatic history. Here, we use
multi-locus molecular genetic data from dense multi-species sampling of
freshwater fishes across three biodiversity hotspots, to test the effect
of Quaternary climate change and resulting drainage rearrangements on
aquatic faunal diversification. While Cenozoic geological processes have
clearly shaped evolutionary history in Southeast Asian halfbeak fishes, we
show that paleo-drainage re-arrangements resulting from Quaternary climate
change played a significant role in the spatiotemporal evolution of
lowland aquatic taxa, and provides priorities for conservation efforts.