Biogeographical Network Analysis of Cretaceous Terrestrial Tetrapods: A Phylogeny-Based Approach
Abstract
Network methods are widely used to represent and analyze biogeography. It is difficult, however, to convert occurrence data of fossil vertebrates to a biogeographical network, as most species were known from a single locality. A new method for creating a biogeographical network that can incorporate phylogenetic information is proposed in this study, which increases the number of edges in the network of fossil vertebrates and enables the application of various network methods. Using ancestral state reconstruction via maximum parsimony, the method first estimates the biogeographical regions of all internal nodes of a given phylogeny using biogeographical information on the terminal taxa. Then, each internal node in the phylogenetic tree is converted to an edge in the biogeographical network that connects the region(s), if unambiguously estimated, of its two descendants. The new method was applied to phylogenetic trees generated by a birth-death model. Under all conditions tested, an average of $CDATA[$CDATA[$>$$70% of the internal nodes in phylogenetic trees were converted into edges. Three network indices-link density, average link weight, and endemism index (EI)-were evaluated for their usefulness in comparing different biogeographical networks. The EI reflects the rate of dispersal; the other indices reflect nonbiogeographical parameters, the number of taxa and regions, which highlights the importance of evaluating network indices before applying them to biogeographical…
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