#BioGeoBEARS
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rbgkew.bsky.social
Plants… with passports?
Turns out black pepper has a way more dramatic backstory than we thought! 🌎
Piper plants travelled across continents, adapted to the tropics, and diversified like pros.
Ancestral range estimation in genus Piper obtained from BioGeoBEARS using the BAYAREALIKE+J model. Pie diagrams show relative probability of possible combinations of areas. Coloured dots at the tips show native ranges of species. Outgroup not shown.
May 12, 2025 at 10:13 AM
palaeo-jrule.bsky.social
Probably this one, the main paper from my PhD.

It describes the first monk seal 🦭 from the Southern Hemisphere (3 Ma, New Zealand). And the first FBD phylogeny for phocids.

Main finding: our BioGeoBEARS analysis found that monachine seals dispersed in Australasia, rather than the N. Hemisphere.
December 4, 2024 at 9:33 PM
swarmofthoughts.bsky.social
How fossil insects projects are going: 2016 "Oh, cute poorly preserved Jurassic Chironomid, subject for a very quick note" - 2024 "All right, learning curve for BioGeoBears is steep, but we also need a morphological phylogeny in this paper..." #Fossilfriday www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🦖⚒️
February 6, 2026 at 10:39 AM
tscourses.bsky.social
How did species end up where they are?

A new edition of our Biogeobears course is now open for registration!
https://www.transmittingscience.com/courses/evolution/model-based-statistical-inference-evolutionary-biogeography-2/
Close-up of a map of Australia with colorful pins marking various cities and destinations.
July 17, 2025 at 12:02 PM
sababausa.bsky.social
the genomics research on South American canids is an interesting case study, because the common ancestor only entered SA ~4 million years ago, and irradiated into ~8 species, first on a north-south axis to the east of the Andes, then much later pushing west across the Andes
Species tree and ancestral area reconstruction of SA canids. The species tree was estimated by applying ASTRAL-III (45) to 6,716 genomic windows (25 kb each). A total of 31 genomes were included in the analysis (SI Appendix, Table S1), but only the clade containing SA canids is shown here (see complete tree in SI Appendix, Fig. S1). All nodes had 100% bootstrap support based on 100 replicates. The best-fitting BioGeoBEARS (46) model was DIVALIKE (dispersal vicariance) with the parameter “J” that represents a founder event (SI Appendix, Fig. S2 and Table S2). Colored boxes on each node indicate estimated ancestral ranges, while boxes at terminal branches indicate current species distribution (“e,” east of the Andes; “c,” central region of the Andes; and “w,” west of the Andes). The probabilities of these ancestral regions are shown in the pie charts below each node. Purple-colored pie charts indicate a distribution on the west and east of the Andes. The maps on the Right represent the distribution of species within three major clades. The colored distributions on the map match the colors underlining species names. Canid illustrations from ref. 2 are used with permission from Princeton University Press.
September 24, 2026 at 3:10 PM
andrewlhipp.bsky.social
Exciting new study by my student, Kieran Althaus, & colleagues in Morelia and Durango demonstrates how phylogenetic niche conservatism, migration, & diversification shape the Mexican Transition Zone in plants.

** Supported by the Department of Education **

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Digital Elevation model (DEM) and species richness of Mexico. (A) DEM of Mexico. Units in meters. (B) Species richness using occurrence data acquired through GBIF (n = 2,659,777). Species richness levels binned into grids were smoothed with spatial kriging. Inset: Map of North America, with the study area (Mexico) outlined in red. Results from the Grade of Membership models mapped onto Mexico. The colour and opacity of each grid cell indicates ω nk , the proportion of cell n in flora k. Opacity values range from 0 (transparent, no membership) to 1 (solid colour, complete membership). (A)[NOT SHOWN] Model results for K = 2. (B) Model results for K = 3. Inset maps show model results with the Sierra Madre's Occidental, Oriental and Trans-Mexican Volcanic belt mapped. Both results highlight the importance Mexico's mountains play in structuring plant communities: K = 2 highlighting the role mountains play in dividing floras, while K = 3 emphasises montane regions as a distinct flora. Biogeographic event frequency through time estimated from biogeographic stochastic mappings (BSM) from 100 independent DEC models implemented in BioGeoBears. Each subplot summarises events for each region: (A) Nearctic (Flora 1), (B) Transition Zone (Flora 2), and (C) Neotropics (Flora 3). The frequency through time for each BSM was plotted with transparency set to 0.1. Colour shading thus represents confidence intervals around the frequency of an event at a given time. The importance of cladogenetic events in generating biodiversity is much higher in the Neotropics (C) than in the Nearctic (A) or Transition Zone (B), where dispersal has a higher frequency
March 27, 2025 at 11:22 AM
sicbjournals.bsky.social
IOB

"...whether speciation has occurred in #subterranean #ecosystems among #organisms obligately adapted to them remains controversial."

Aquifer-Mediated #Speciation in Cave-Adapted #Fishes
C D Brownstein et al

doi.org/10.1093/iob/...

#fossils #cavefish #science
Fig. 4 Aquifers facilitated dispersal and vicariance in Typhlichthys.(A) Historical biogeographic reconstruction from the best-fit model in BioGeoBEARS (BAYAREALIKE) annotated on the node-dated phylogeny of Typhlichthys and other species in Amblyopsidae inferred in BEAST 2.6.7. Bars at nodes indicate 95% highest posterior density (HPD) intervals of divergence times. Squares at nodes indicate inferred ancestral areas. Circles at tips indicate #species shown on maps in Figure 1 and in Figure 4B. Inferred historical #biogeography of Typhlichthys is provided in (B). Aquifer colors are the same as in Figure 4 (A) and Figure 1 (B). Arrows indicate direction of key dispersals. Colored circles indicate selected lineages labeled in (A), and yellow star indicates the site of Key Cave, Alabama, USA, where two species of Typhlichthys are in sympatry, and the only locality where Speoplatyrhinus poulsoni, the sister lineage to Typhlichthys, is known to occur. Red dashed lines indicate where connectivity between different aquifers has apparently been reduced, facilitating the allopatric speciation and dispersal of #Typhlichthys.
August 12, 2026 at 11:29 AM
tscourses.bsky.social
Taught by Dr. Nick Matzke, the course will introduce modern model-based methods, including BioGeoBEARS, for reconstructing ancestral geographic ranges and studying how biodiversity changes through space and time.
July 13, 2026 at 8:30 AM
master-rainet.bsky.social
1st Year Msc @marceau_habrant is in Grenoble for 1 month now. Co-supervised by PhD Laure Gallien and Msc Sarah Weil at the LECA in @Wil_Thuiller's lab. Past biogeography study of tortoises is doing great so far ! #BioGeoBEARS #Tortoise
January 26, 2025 at 9:58 PM
master-rainet.bsky.social
7/7
@marceau_habrant sera en stage de M1 au Laboratoire d’Ecologie Alpine, @UGrenobleAlpes. Dirigé par Laure Gallien et Sarah Weil, il testera l’hypothèse selon laquelle des ancêtres colonisateurs engendrent des espèces envahissantes en contexte mondialisé #invasive #BioGeoBEARS
January 26, 2025 at 9:56 PM
tscourses.bsky.social
#TScourses #KeepLearning #biogeography #evolutionarybiology #Biogeobears #Rstats #sciencetraining #virtualcourse

🌍🧬📈
July 17, 2025 at 12:02 PM