Life Sciences Commons^™

On The Relationship Between Phylogenetic Diversity And Trait Diversity, Caroline M. Tucker, T. Jonathan Davies, Marc W. Cadotte, William D. Pearse

Biology Faculty Publications

Niche differences are key to understanding the distribution and structure of biodiversity. To examine niche differences, we must first characterize how species occupy niche space, and two approaches are commonly used in the ecological literature. The first uses species traits to estimate multivariate trait space (so‐called functional trait diversity, FD); the second quantifies the amount of time or evolutionary history captured by a group of species (phylogenetic diversity, PD). It is often—but controversially—assumed that these putative measures of niche space are at a minimum correlated and perhaps redundant, since more evolutionary time allows for greater accumulation of trait changes. This …

Target Sequence Capture Of Nuclear-Encoded Genes For Phylogenetic Analysis In Ferns, Paul G. Wolf, Tanner A. Robison, Matthew G. Johnson, Michael A. Sundue, Weston L. Testo, Carl J. Rothfels

Biology Faculty Publications

Premise of the Study

Until recently, most phylogenetic studies of ferns were based on chloroplast genes. Evolutionary inferences based on these data can be incomplete because the characters are from a single linkage group and are uniparentally inherited. These limitations are particularly acute in studies of hybridization, which is prevalent in ferns; fern hybrids are common and ferns are able to hybridize across highly diverged lineages, up to 60 million years since divergence in one documented case. However, it not yet clear what effect such hybridization has on fern evolution, in part due to a paucity of available biparentally inherited …