Endemicity analysis, parsimony and biotic elements: a formal comparison using hypothetical distributions.

Area of Science:

• Biogeography
• Phylogenetics
• Systematic Biology

Background:

• Identifying areas of endemism is crucial for understanding biodiversity patterns.
• Current methods for identifying areas of endemism lack universal agreement and can yield conflicting results.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the effectiveness of Endemicity Analysis (EA), Parsimony Analysis of Endemicity (PAE), and Biotic Elements Analysis (BE).
• To evaluate these methods' ability to detect hypothetical areas of endemism with varying degrees of species overlap and sympatry.

Main Methods:

• Simulated hypothetical areas of endemism with nested, overlapping, and disjoint patterns.
• Tested EA, PAE, and BE on these patterns using species data with different sympatry levels.

Main Results:

• PAE performed poorly with overlapping areas and imperfectly sympatric species.
• BE showed unexpected limitations with perfectly sympatric species.
• EA consistently identified distributional patterns with high accuracy across all tested scenarios.

Conclusions:

• EA is a more robust method for identifying areas of endemism compared to PAE and BE.
• Methodological choices significantly impact the identification of endemism patterns.
• Caution is advised against interpreting results that may be artifacts of the analytical method.