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Published on: August 14, 2018
RASP (Reconstruct Ancestral State in Phylogenies): a tool for historical biogeography
Yan Yu1, Alan J Harris2, Christopher Blair3
1Key Laboratory of Bio-Resources and Eco-Environment of Ministry of Education, College of Life Sciences, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan 610065, PR China; Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, BioSci 130 Science Drive, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
Abstract:
We announce the release of Reconstruct Ancestral State in Phylogenies (RASP), a user-friendly software package for inferring historical biogeography through reconstructing ancestral geographic distributions on phylogenetic trees. RASP utilizes the widely used Statistical-Dispersal Vicariance Analysis (S-DIVA), the Dispersal-Extinction-Cladogenesis (DEC) model (Lagrange), a Statistical DEC model (S-DEC) and BayArea. It provides a graphical user interface (GUI) to specify a phylogenetic tree or set of trees and geographic distribution constraints, draws pie charts on the nodes of a phylogenetic tree to indicate levels of uncertainty, and generates high-quality exportable graphical results. RASP can run on both Windows and Mac OS X platforms. All documentation and source code for RASP is freely available at http://mnh.scu.edu.cn/soft/blog/RASP.
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