National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-1527, USA.
Syst Biol. 2010 May;59(3):298-306. doi: 10.1093/sysbio/syq005. Epub 2010 Feb 26.
Traditionally, the goal of systematics has been to produce classifications that are both strongly supported and biologically meaningful. In recent years several authors have advocated complementing phylogenetic analyses with measures of another form of evolutionary change, ecological divergence. These analyses frequently rely on ecological niche models to determine if species have comparable environmental requirements, but it has heretofore been difficult to test the accuracy of these inferences. To address this problem, I simulate the geographic distributions of allopatric species with identical environmental requirements. I then test whether existing analyses based on geographic distributions will correctly infer that the 2 species' requirements are identical. This work demonstrates that when taxa disperse to different environments, many analyses can erroneously infer changes in environmental requirements, but the severity of the problem depends on the method used. As this could exaggerate the number of ecologically distinct taxa in a clade, I suggest diagnostics to mitigate this problem.
传统上，系统学的目标是生成既具有强支持度又具有生物学意义的分类。近年来，有几位作者提倡在系统发育分析的基础上补充另一种形式的进化变化的度量，即生态分歧。这些分析通常依赖于生态位模型来确定物种是否具有相似的环境需求，但迄今为止，很难测试这些推断的准确性。为了解决这个问题，我模拟了具有相同环境需求的异域物种的地理分布。然后，我测试现有的基于地理分布的分析是否能正确推断出这两个物种的需求是相同的。这项工作表明，当分类单元分散到不同的环境中时，许多分析可能会错误地推断出环境需求的变化，但问题的严重程度取决于所使用的方法。由于这可能会夸大一个类群中具有明显生态差异的分类单元的数量，因此我建议使用诊断方法来减轻这个问题。
