Upcoming on phyloseminar "Inferring macroevolutionary processes based on phylogenetic trees"

See phyloseminar.org home for more detail.

Next talk

Inferring macroevolutionary processes based on phylogenetic trees”

Tanja Gernhard Stadler (ETH Zurich)

Phylogenetic trees of present-day species allow inference of the rate of speciation and extinction which led to the present-day diversity. Classically, inference methods assume a constant rate of diversification, or neglect extinction. I will discuss major limitations of this null model and will present a new framework which allows speciation and extinction rates to change through time (environmental-dependent diversification), with the number of species (density-dependent diversification), and with a trait of a species (trait-dependent diversification). For the latter model, particular focus is given to the trait being the age of a species. Issues arising in empirical data analysis, such as incomplete taxon sampling, model selection, and confidence interval estimation, will be discussed. The methods reveal interesting macroevolutionary dynamics for mammals, birds and ants, and can easily be applied to other datasets using the R packages TreePar and TreeSim available on CRAN.

West Coast USA: 10:00 (10:00 AM) on Wednesday, September 19

East Coast USA: 13:00 (01:00 PM) on Wednesday, September 19

UK: 18:00 (06:00 PM) on Wednesday, September 19

France: 19:00 (07:00 PM) on Wednesday, September 19

Japan: 02:00 (02:00 AM) on Thursday, September 20

New Zealand: 05:00 (05:00 AM) on Thursday, September 20