Probabilistic historical biogeography: new models for founder-event speciation, imperfect detection, and fossils allow improved accuracy and model-testing

Historical biogeography has been characterized by a large diversity of methods and unresolved debates about which processes, such as dispersal or vicariance, are most important for explaining distributions. A new R package, BioGeoBEARS, implements many models in a common likelihood framework, so that standard statistical model selection procedures can be applied to let the data choose the best model. Available models include a likelihood version of DIVA (“DIVALIKE”), LAGRANGE’s DEC model, and BAYAREA, as well as “+J” versions of these models which include founder-event speciation, an important process left out of most inference methods. I use BioGeoBEARS on a large sample of island and non-island clades…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: DEB-0919451, 0919451
• HK
  Hong Kong Institute of Education