Data from: Community trees: identifying codiversification in the Páramo dipteran community

Groups of codistributed species that responded in a concerted manner to environmental events are expected to share a pattern of evolutionary diversification. However, the identification of such groups has largely been based on qualitative, post hoc analyses. We develop here two methods (PPS, K-F ANOVA) for the analysis of codistributed species that, allow empiricists to identify those taxa that do not codiversify (i.e., "outlier" species). The identification of outlier species makes it possible to jointly estimate the evolutionary history of co-diversifying taxa. To evaluate the approaches presented here, we collected data from Páramo dipterans, identified outlier species, and estimated a "community tree" from species that are identified as having co-diversified. Our results demonstrate that dipteran communities from different Páramo habitats in the same mountain range are more closely related than communities in other ranges. We also conduct simulation testing to evaluate this approach. Results suggest that our approach provides a useful addition to comparative phylogeographic methods, while identifying aspects of the analysis that require careful interpretation. By modeling a common history and explicitly seeking to identify outlier species, the community tree framework offers an approach for the identification of evolutionary communities – species that share both ecological interactions and evolutionary history.