Thursday 9 June 2011

Terrestrial Mammal Geophylogeny

I have been intending to build a geophylogeny from the Bininda-Emonds et al. mammal supertree and range maps (Sechrest "World Wide Global Diversity, Endemism, and Conservation of Mammals". PhD Thesis, Univ. Virginia 2003) but have only got round to doing it. The delay was primarily due to the need to prune the mammal tree to species for which there are range maps. This I have now implemented in the Entangled Bank.

The geophylogney was built in GeophyloBuilder using the range centroids with an envelope model. I have put together two quick visualizations, a map with nodes coloured by age and a movie in ArcGlobe. The map shows a clustering of old nodes toward the center of continents and in ocean basins. The former represent continental endemicity, the latter transcontinental vicariance or dispersal.
In ArcGlobe something strange is going on with branches the cross the inverse-prime meridian, looks like an ESRI bug to me.

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