[TABD] Please review our paper: Diversity dynamics in Nymphalidae butterflies

[Carlos Pena]

Hi all,



We got infected by the "open peer-review" fashion so I posted our 
unpublished manuscript for open-peer review on Peerage of Science.

The title is:
"Diversity dynamics in Nymphalidae butterflies: Effect of phylogenetic 
uncertainty on diversification rate shift estimates"

You are welcome to review and provide comments/criticism.

The manuscript is available at: https://www.peerageofscience.org/?link=63485

Note that you will need to create an account. See the abstract below.

Thanks!

=================
Abstract:

The family Nymphalidae is the largest family within the true butterflies 
and has been used to develop hypotheses explaining evolutionary 
interactions between plants and insects. Theories of insect and 
hostplant dynamics predict accelerated diversification in some 
scenarios. We investigated whether phylogenetic uncertainty affects a 
commonly used method (MEDUSA, modelling evolutionary diversity using 
stepwise AIC) for estimating shifts in diversification rates in lineages 
of the family Nymphalidae, by extending the method to run across a 
random sample of phylogenetic trees from the posterior distribution of a 
Bayesian run. We found that phylogenetic uncertainty greatly affects 
diversification rate estimates. Different trees from the posterior 
distribution can give diversification rates ranging from high values to 
almost zero for the same clade, and for some clades both significant 
rate increase and decrease were estimated.  Only three out of 13 
significant shifts found on the maximum credibility tree were consistent 
across more than 95% of the trees from the posterior: (i) accelerated 
diversification for Solanaceae feeders in the tribe Ithomiini; (ii) 
accelerated diversification in the genus Charaxes, and (iii) 
deceleration in the Danaina. By using the binary speciation and 
extinction model (BISSE), we found that a hostplant shift to Solanaceae 
or a codistributed character is responsible for the increase in 
diversification rate in Ithomiini, and the result is congruent with the 
diffuse cospeciation hypothesis. A shift to Apocynaceae is not 
responsible for the slowdown of diversification in Danaina. Our results 
show that taking phylogenetic uncertainty into account when estimating 
diversification rate shifts is of great importance, and relying on the 
maximum credibility tree alone potentially can give erroneous results.

Keywords: diversification analysis, MEDUSA, BiSSE, speciation rate, 
insect-hostplant dynamics
=================



carlos

-- 
Dr. Carlos Peña
Laboratory of Genetics
Department of Biology
University of Turku
20014 Turku
FINLAND

* Associated Editor, Revista Peruana de Biología
http://revistasinvestigacion.unmsm.edu.pe/index.php/rpb
* The Nymphalidae Systematics Group
http://nymphalidae.utu.fi/db.php