Related papers: Neutral phylogenetic models and their role in tree…
For many taxa, the current high rates of extinction are likely to result in a significant loss of biodiversity. The evolutionary heritage of biodiversity is frequently quantified by a measure called phylogenetic diversity (PD). We predict…
Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this…
The constant rate birth--death process is a popular null model for speciation and extinction. If one removes extinct and non-sampled lineages, this process induces `reconstructed trees' which describe the relationship between extant…
In conservation biology, phylogenetic diversity (PD) provides a way to quantify the impact of the current rapid extinction of species on the evolutionary `Tree of Life'. This approach recognises that extinction not only removes species but…
Phylogenies are commonly used to represent the evolutionary relationships between species, and often these phylogenies are equipped with edge lengths that indicate degrees of evolutionary difference. Given such a phylogeny, a popular…
Phylogenetic trees are widely used to understand the evolutionary history of organisms. Tree shapes provide information about macroevolutionary processes. However, macroevolutionary models are unreliable for inferring the true processes…
Phylogenetic Diversity (PD) is a prominent quantitative measure of the biodiversity of a collection of present-day species (taxa). This measure is based on the evolutionary distance among the species in the collection. Loosely speaking, if…
Motivated as a null model for comparison with data, we study the following model for a phylogenetic tree on $n$ extant species. The origin of the clade is a random time in the past, whose (improper) distribution is uniform on $(0,\infty)$.…
The loss of biodiversity due to the likely widespread extinction of species in the near future is a focus of current concern in conservation biology. One approach to measure the impact of this extinction is based on the predicted loss of…
There have been many studies to examine whether one trait is correlated with another trait across a group of present-day species (for example, do species with larger brains tend to have longer gestation times. Since the introduction of the…
Phylogenetic trees represent the evolutionary relationships between extant lineages, where extinct or non-sampled lineages are omitted. Extending the work of Stadler and collaborators, this paper focuses on the branch lengths in…
Planning for the protection of species often involves difficult choices about which species to prioritize, given constrained resources. One way of prioritizing species is to consider their "evolutionary distinctiveness", i.e. their relative…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the `tree of life' today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as…
Stochastic modeling of phylogenies raises five questions that have received varying levels of attention from quantitatively inclined biologists. 1) How large do we expect (from the model) the ration of maximum historical diversity to…
We compare three basic kinds of discrete mathematical models used to portray phylogenetic relationships among species and higher taxa: phylogenetic trees, Hennig trees and Nelson cladograms. All three models are trees, as that term is…
Species extinction is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. Competition between species in a population is considered by ecological niche-based theories as a key factor leading to different severity of species…
We present novel analytical results about ecosystem species diversity that stem from a proposed coarse grained neutral model based on birth-death processes. The relevance of the problem lies in the urgency for understanding and synthesizing…
Phylogenetic Diversity (PD) is a measure of the overall biodiversity of a set of present-day species (taxa) within a phylogenetic tree. In Maximize Phylogenetic Diversity (MPD) one is asked to find a set of taxa (of bounded size/cost) for…
We use a classical combinatorial inequality to establish a Markov inequality for multivariate binary Markov processes on trees. We then apply this result, alongside with the FKG inequality, to compare the expected loss of biodiversity under…