Investigating historical drivers of latitudinal gradients in polyploid plant biogeography: A multiclade perspective.

Premise: The proportion of polyploid plants in a community increases with latitude, and different hypotheses have been proposed about which factors drive this pattern. Here, we aimed to understand the historical causes of the latitudinal polyploidy gradient using a combination of ancestral state reconstruction methods. Specifically, we assessed whether (1) polyploidization enables movement to higher latitudes (i.

The evolutionary responses of life-history strategies to climatic variability in flowering plants.

The evolution of annual or perennial strategies in flowering plants likely depends on a broad array of temperature and precipitation variables. Previous documented climate life-history correlations in explicit phylogenetic frameworks have been limited to certain clades and geographic regions. To gain insights which generalize to multiple lineages we employ a multi-clade approach analyzing 32 groups of angiosperms across eight climatic variables.

A novel method for jointly modeling the evolution of discrete and continuous traits.

The correlated evolution of multiple characters is a crucial aspect of evolutionary change. If change in a particular character influences the evolution of a separate trait, then modeling these features independently can mislead our understanding of the evolutionary process. Progress toward jointly modeling several characters has involved modeling multivariate evolution of the same class of character, but there are far fewer options when jointly modeling traits when one character is discrete and the other is continuous.

Reducing the Biases in False Correlations Between Discrete Characters.

The correlation between two characters is often interpreted as evidence that there exists a significant and biologically important relationship between them. However, Maddison and FitzJohn (in The unsolved challenge to phylogenetic correlation tests for categorical characters. Syst.