Data from: Reconstructing the geography of speciation from contemporary biodiversity data

Inferring the geographic mode of speciation could help reveal the
evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that underlie the generation of
biodiversity. Comparative methods have sought to reconstruct the
geographic speciation history of clades using data on phylogeny and
species’ geographic ranges. However, inference from comparative methods
has been limited by uncertainty over whether contemporary biodiversity
data retain the historic signal of speciation. We constructed a
process-based simulation model to determine the influence of speciation
mode and post-speciation range evolution on current biodiversity patterns.
The simulations suggest that the signal of speciation history remains
detectable in species distributions and phylogeny, even when species
ranges have evolved substantially through time. We extracted this signal
using a combination of summary statistics that had good power to
distinguish speciation modes, then used these statistics to infer the
speciation history of 30 plant and animal clades. The results point to
broad taxonomic patterns in the modes of speciation, with strongest
support for founder speciation in mammals and birds, and strongest support
for sympatric speciation in plants. Our model and analyses show that
broad-scale comparative methods can be a powerful complementary approach
to more focused genomic analyses in the study of the patterns and
mechanisms of speciation.