Format: ORAL

Valcrcel, V.1,2, Coca de la Iglesia, M.1, Gallego, A.1, Wen, J.3, Medina, N.G.1,2

1Departamento de Biología, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid 28049, Spain. 2Centro de Investigación en Biodiversidad y Cambio Global (CIBC-UAM), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid 28049, Spain. 3Department of Botany/MRC 166, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA.

Current approaches that integrate climatic niche in evolutionary studies often fail to consider the climatic heterogeneity of species, the climatic context in which they live and the complexity of the Worlds climate. Indeed, evolutionary studies often resort to climatic classifications to deal with the Worlds climatic complexity or to summary statistics to address the heterogeneity of the species climatic preferences. In this study weevaluate the impact of using different types of climatic data (discrete and continuous) and comparative approaches (character state, quantitative and probabilistic) to reconstruct climatic niche evolution in the Asian Palmatesof Araliaceae, an example of the tropical-temperate diversity pattern. We used phylogenomic reconstructions, worldwide point-occurrence database of the Asian Palmates and five classification schemes of the Worlds climate. We used discrete categorization of genera (tropical or temperate) for the character state reconstruction and the first axis of a climatic PCA for the continuous-based reconstructions, using summary statistics for the quantitative approach and the complete climatic space of each genus for the probabilistic one. The character state and the quantitative reconstructions using maximum and minimum values were inconclusive. Instead, we disclosed a general preference of the Asian Palmates ancestors for the subtropical and tropical climatic transition when using the mean and median values. The probabilistic approach allowed us to uncover the narrow ancestral climate niches of the ancestors in comparison to the broad niches of the extant genera. We propose the probabilistic approach at least for lineages with high climatic heterogeneity or living in highly heterogeneous regions. However, since the precision of this probabilistic approach is highly dependent on the accuracy of the distribution data, we also provide a pipeline to consider climatic heterogeneity and the complexity of the Worlds climate for ancestral reconstructions in lineages in which the knowledge of species distribution is poor or biased.