Sensitivity of biogeographic reconstructions to the use of differential extinction rates

Escuela de Biología, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Bucaramanga, Colombia
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2440v1
Subject Areas
Biogeography, Conservation Biology
Keywords
Extinction rates, Historical biogeography
Copyright
© 2016 Pinzón
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Pinzón JL. 2016. Sensitivity of biogeographic reconstructions to the use of differential extinction rates. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2440v1

Abstract

Effects of differential extinction rates remain being an issue in biogeographic and evolutionary studies. Here, I use empirical examples and simulated datasets to asses how the specification of different extinction rates influences ancestral range estimation in historical biogeography. The results showed that variations in scale and asymmetry of extinction rates may have notorious effects in the accuracy of biogeographic inferences, specially when the rates of extinction are high. Further work may explore the behavior of current statistical methods of biogeographic inference with different estimates of extinction based on novel developments in this field.

Author Comment

This is a preliminary submission to PeerJ preprints.