A unified framework to investigate and interpret hybrid and allopolyploid biodiversity across biological scales.

Premise: Hybridization and polyploidization are common in vascular plants and important drivers of biodiversity by facilitating speciation and ecological diversification. A primary limitation to making broad synthetic discoveries in hybrid and allopolyploid biodiversity research is the absence of a standardized framework to compare data across studies and biological scales.

Methods: Here, I present a new quantitative framework to investigate and interpret patterns in hybrid and allopolyploid biology called the divergence index (DI).