Community trees: Identifying codiversification in the Páramo dipteran community

Area of Science:

• Ecology
• Evolutionary Biology
• Biogeography

Background:

• Codistributed species are expected to share evolutionary diversification patterns.
• Identifying these groups has relied on qualitative analyses.
• A need exists for quantitative methods to identify co-diversifying species and outliers.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate quantitative methods for identifying co-diversifying species and "outlier" species.
• To enable joint estimation of evolutionary history for co-diversifying taxa.
• To apply these methods to Páramo dipteran communities.

Main Methods:

• Posterior predictive simulation (PPS) for analyzing codistributed species.
• Kuhner-Felsenstein (K-F) analysis of variance (ANOVA) to detect outlier species.
• Estimation of a "community tree" using identified co-diversifying species.

Main Results:

• The methods successfully identified outlier species in Páramo dipterans.
• Dipteran communities within the same mountain range showed closer relatedness than those across ranges.
• Simulation testing indicated acceptable performance with one or two outliers, but decreased accuracy with more outliers.

Conclusions:

• The developed PPS and K-F ANOVA methods are valuable additions to comparative phylogeography.
• Accurate identification of co-diversifying species improves evolutionary history estimations.
• Interpretation requires consideration of the number of outliers and existing phylogeographic knowledge.