Jhonny J M Guedes, Mario R Moura, Lucas Jardim, José Alexandre F Diniz-Filho
{"title":"Global Patterns of Taxonomic Uncertainty and its Impacts on Biodiversity Research","authors":"Jhonny J M Guedes, Mario R Moura, Lucas Jardim, José Alexandre F Diniz-Filho","doi":"10.1093/sysbio/syaf010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syaf010","url":null,"abstract":"Over two million species have been named so far, but many will be invalidated due to redundant descriptions. Undetected invalid species (i.e., synonyms) can impair inferences we make in biodiversity research and hamper the implementation of effective conservation strategies. However, the processes leading to the accumulation of invalid names remain largely unknown. Using multi-model inferences, we investigated the patterns and potential drivers of species- and assemblage-level variation in synonym counts across terrestrial vertebrates globally. We also explored how taxonomic uncertainty (i.e., instability in species identities) can affect latitudinal variation of diversification rates. The average number of synonyms was higher for species described earlier, better represented in scientific collections, with larger geographic ranges, occurring in temperate regions, and in areas of high biodiversity attention. In assemblage-level models, a higher average number of synonyms was associated with temperate regions harbouring more early-described species. Areas of high endemism richness showed fewer synonyms across amphibians and reptiles but had an inverse effect for birds and mammals. Other predictor-response relationships varied across taxonomic groups, biogeographical realm, and spatial grain. Assuming that more synonyms indicate more stable species that have been thoroughly studied and reviewed, high synonym numbers in temperate species and assemblages support claims of a potential latitudinal taxonomy gradient, where geographic variation in taxonomic practice could hinder the proper recognition of tropical species. We show that the accumulation of invalid names is not random and discuss how invalid hidden names can affect biodiversity inferences. A potential approach to address this problem would be developing a taxonomic uncertainty metric that could be incorporated into models (i.e., as weights to account for varying degrees of uncertainty during the fitting process). Our study provides an initial approximation and highlights the often-neglected issue of uncertainty and instability in species identities from a macroecological perspective.","PeriodicalId":22120,"journal":{"name":"Systematic Biology","volume":"1861 3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143417492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Claudio G Ametrano, Jacob Jensen, H Thorsten Lumbsch, Felix Grewe
{"title":"UnFATE: A Comprehensive Probe Set and Bioinformatics Pipeline for Phylogeny Reconstruction and Multilocus Barcoding of Filamentous Ascomycetes (Ascomycota, Pezizomycotina)","authors":"Claudio G Ametrano, Jacob Jensen, H Thorsten Lumbsch, Felix Grewe","doi":"10.1093/sysbio/syaf011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syaf011","url":null,"abstract":"The subphylum Pezizomycotina (filamentous ascomycetes) is the largest clade within Ascomycota. Despite the importance of this group of fungi, our understanding of their evolution is still limited due to insufficient taxon sampling. Although next-generation sequencing technology allows us to obtain complete genomes for phylogenetic analyses, generating complete genomes of fungal species can be challenging, especially when fungi occur in symbiotic relationships or when the DNA of rare herbarium specimens is degraded or contaminated. Additionally, assembly, annotation, and gene extraction of whole-genome sequencing data require bioinformatics skills and computational power, resulting in a substantial data burden. To overcome these obstacles, we designed a universal target enrichment probe set to reconstruct the phylogenetic relationships of filamentous ascomycetes at different phylogenetic levels. From a pool of single-copy orthologous genes extracted from available Pezizomycotina genomes, we identified the smallest subset of genetic markers that can reliably reconstruct a robust phylogeny. We used a clustering approach to identify a sequence set that could provide an optimal trade-off between potential missing data and probe set cost. We incorporated this probe set into a user-friendly wrapper script named UnFATE (https://github.com/claudioametrano/UnFATE) that allows phylogenomic inferences without requiring expert bioinformatics knowledge. In addition to phylogenetic results, the software provides a powerful multilocus alternative to ITS-based barcoding. Phylogeny and barcoding approaches can be complemented by an integrated, pre-processed, and periodically updated database of all publicly available Pezizomycotina genomes. The UnFATE pipeline, using the 195 selected marker genes, consistently performed well across various phylogenetic depths, generating trees consistent with the reference phylogenomic inferences. The topological distance between the reference trees from literature and the best tree produced by UnFATE ranged between 0.10 and 0.14 (nRF) for phylogenies from family to subphylum level. We also tested the in vitro success of the universal baits set in a target capture approach on 25 herbarium specimens from ten representative classes in Pezizomycotina, which recovered a topology congruent with recent phylogenomic inferences for this group of fungi. The discriminating power of our gene set was also assessed by the multilocus barcoding approach, which outperformed the barcoding approach based on ITS. With these tools, we aim to provide a framework for a collaborative approach to build robust, conclusive phylogenies of this important fungal clade.","PeriodicalId":22120,"journal":{"name":"Systematic Biology","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143417538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The consequences of budding speciation on trees","authors":"C Tomomi Parins-Fukuchi, James G Saulsbury","doi":"10.1093/sysbio/syaf012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syaf012","url":null,"abstract":"Paleobiologists have long sought to explain how alternative modes of speciation, including budding and bifurcating cladogenesis, shape patterns of evolution. Methods introduced over the past decade have paved the way for a renewed enthusiasm for exploring modes of speciation in the fossil record. However, the field does not yet have a strong intuition for how ancestor-descendant relationships, especially those that arise from budding speciation, might influence the shape of trees reconstructed for fossil or living clades. We developed a simulation approach based on classic paleobiological theory to ask what proportion of ancestral nodes in paleontological phylogenies are expected to correspond to sampled taxa under a range of preservational regimes. We compared our simulated results to empirical estimates of absolute fossil record completeness gathered from the literature and found that many fossilized clades of marine invertebrates are likely to display upwards of 80% sampled ancestors. Under a primarily budding model, phylogenies where 100% of the internal nodes correspond to named species are very possible for well-sampled clades at local and regional scales. We also leveraged our simulation approach to ask how budding might shape extant clades. We found that the ancestral signature of budding causes rampant hard polytomies (i.e., multifurcations), greatly impacting the shape of extant clades. Our results highlight how budding can yield dramatic and unrecognized effects on phylogenetic reconstruction of clades of both living and extinct organisms.","PeriodicalId":22120,"journal":{"name":"Systematic Biology","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143417539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kate Truman, Timothy G Vaughan, Alex Gavryushkin, Alexandra Sasha Gavryushkina
{"title":"The Fossilized Birth-Death Model Is Identifiable.","authors":"Kate Truman, Timothy G Vaughan, Alex Gavryushkin, Alexandra Sasha Gavryushkina","doi":"10.1093/sysbio/syae058","DOIUrl":"10.1093/sysbio/syae058","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Time-dependent birth-death sampling models have been used in numerous studies to infer past evolutionary dynamics in different biological contexts, for example, speciation and extinction rates in macroevolutionary studies, or effective reproductive number in epidemiological studies. These models are branching processes where lineages can bifurcate, die, or be sampled with time-dependent birth, death, and sampling rates, generating phylogenetic trees. It has been shown that in some subclasses of such models, different sets of rates can result in the same distributions of reconstructed phylogenetic trees, and therefore, the rates become unidentifiable from the trees regardless of their size. Here, we show that widely used time-dependent fossilized birth-death (FBD) models are identifiable. This subclass of models makes more realistic assumptions about the fossilization process and certain infectious disease transmission processes than the unidentifiable birth-death sampling models. Namely, FBD models assume that sampled lineages stay in the process rather than being immediately removed upon sampling. The identifiability of the time-dependent FBD model justifies using statistical methods that implement this model to infer the underlying temporal diversification or epidemiological dynamics from phylogenetic trees or directly from molecular or other comparative data. We further show that the time-dependent FBD model with an extra parameter, the removal after sampling probability, is unidentifiable. This implies that in scenarios where we do not know how sampling affects lineages, we are unable to infer this extra parameter together with birth, death, and sampling rates solely from trees.</p>","PeriodicalId":22120,"journal":{"name":"Systematic Biology","volume":" ","pages":"112-123"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11997801/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142475252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Phylogenomics of Bivalvia Using Ultraconserved Elements Reveal New Topologies for Pteriomorphia and Imparidentia.","authors":"Yi-Xuan Li, Jack Chi-Ho Ip, Chong Chen, Ting Xu, Qian Zhang, Yanan Sun, Pei-Zhen Ma, Jian-Wen Qiu","doi":"10.1093/sysbio/syae052","DOIUrl":"10.1093/sysbio/syae052","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Despite significant advances in phylogenetics over the past decades, the deep relationships within Bivalvia (phylum Mollusca) remain inconclusive. Previous efforts based on morphology or several genes have failed to resolve many key nodes in the phylogeny of Bivalvia. Advances have been made recently using transcriptome data, but the phylogenetic relationships within Bivalvia historically lacked consensus, especially within Pteriomorphia and Imparidentia. Here, we inferred the relationships of key lineages within Bivalvia using matrices generated from specifically designed ultraconserved elements (UCEs) with 16 available genomic resources and 85 newly sequenced specimens from 55 families. Our new probes (Bivalve UCE 2k v.1) for target sequencing captured an average of 849 UCEs with 1085 bp in mean length from in vitro experiments. Our results introduced novel schemes from 6 major clades (Protobranchina, Pteriomorphia, Palaeoheterodonta, Archiheterodonta, Anomalodesmata, and Imparidentia), though some inner nodes were poorly resolved, such as paraphyletic Heterodonta in some topologies potentially due to insufficient taxon sampling. The resolution increased when analyzing specific matrices for Pteriomorphia and Imparidentia. We recovered 3 Pteriomorphia topologies different from previously published trees, with the strongest support for ((Ostreida + (Arcida + Mytilida)) + (Pectinida + (Limida + Pectinida))). Limida were nested within Pectinida, warranting further studies. For Imparidentia, our results strongly supported the new hypothesis of (Galeommatida + (Adapedonta + Cardiida)), while the possible non-monophyly of Lucinida was inferred but poorly supported. Overall, our results provide important insights into the phylogeny of Bivalvia and show that target enrichment sequencing of UCEs can be broadly applied to study both deep and shallow phylogenetic relationships.</p>","PeriodicalId":22120,"journal":{"name":"Systematic Biology","volume":" ","pages":"16-33"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142295902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Benjamin S Toups, Robert C Thomson, Jeremy M Brown
{"title":"Complex Models of Sequence Evolution Improve Fit, But Not Gene Tree Discordance, for Tetrapod Mitogenomes.","authors":"Benjamin S Toups, Robert C Thomson, Jeremy M Brown","doi":"10.1093/sysbio/syae056","DOIUrl":"10.1093/sysbio/syae056","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Variation in gene tree estimates is widely observed in empirical phylogenomic data and is often assumed to be the result of biological processes. However, a recent study using tetrapod mitochondrial genomes to control for biological sources of variation due to their haploid, uniparentally inherited, and non-recombining nature found that levels of discordance among mitochondrial gene trees were comparable to those found in studies that assume only biological sources of variation. Additionally, they found that several of the models of sequence evolution chosen to infer gene trees were doing an inadequate job of fitting the sequence data. These results indicated that significant amounts of gene tree discordance in empirical data may be due to poor fit of sequence evolution models and that more complex and biologically realistic models may be needed. To test how the fit of sequence evolution models relates to gene tree discordance, we analyzed the same mitochondrial data sets as the previous study using 2 additional, more complex models of sequence evolution that each include a different biologically realistic aspect of the evolutionary process: A covarion model to incorporate site-specific rate variation across lineages (heterotachy), and a partitioned model to incorporate variable evolutionary patterns by codon position. Our results show that both additional models fit the data better than the models used in the previous study, with the covarion being consistently and strongly preferred as tree size increases. However, even these more preferred models still inferred highly discordant mitochondrial gene trees, thus deepening the mystery around what we label the \"Mito-Phylo Paradox\" and leading us to ask whether the observed variation could, in fact, be biological in nature after all.</p>","PeriodicalId":22120,"journal":{"name":"Systematic Biology","volume":" ","pages":"86-100"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142406814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fábio K Mendes, Remco Bouckaert, Luiz M Carvalho, Alexei J Drummond
{"title":"How to Validate a Bayesian Evolutionary Model.","authors":"Fábio K Mendes, Remco Bouckaert, Luiz M Carvalho, Alexei J Drummond","doi":"10.1093/sysbio/syae064","DOIUrl":"10.1093/sysbio/syae064","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Biology has become a highly mathematical discipline in which probabilistic models play a central role. As a result, research in the biological sciences is now dependent on computational tools capable of carrying out complex analyses. These tools must be validated before they can be used, but what is understood as validation varies widely among methodological contributions. This may be a consequence of the still embryonic stage of the literature on statistical software validation for computational biology. Our manuscript aims to advance this literature. Here, we describe, illustrate, and introduce new good practices for assessing the correctness of a model implementation with an emphasis on Bayesian methods. We also introduce a suite of functionalities for automating validation protocols. It is our hope that the guidelines presented here help sharpen the focus of discussions on (as well as elevate) expected standards of statistical software for biology.</p>","PeriodicalId":22120,"journal":{"name":"Systematic Biology","volume":" ","pages":"158-175"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11809579/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142590679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shifang Mo, Yaowei Zhu, Mariana P Braga, David J Lohman, Sören Nylin, Ashraf Moumou, Christopher W Wheat, Niklas Wahlberg, Min Wang, Fangzhou Ma, Peng Zhang, Houshuai Wang
{"title":"Rapid Evolution of Host Repertoire and Geographic Range in a Young and Diverse Genus of Montane Butterflies.","authors":"Shifang Mo, Yaowei Zhu, Mariana P Braga, David J Lohman, Sören Nylin, Ashraf Moumou, Christopher W Wheat, Niklas Wahlberg, Min Wang, Fangzhou Ma, Peng Zhang, Houshuai Wang","doi":"10.1093/sysbio/syae061","DOIUrl":"10.1093/sysbio/syae061","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Evolutionary changes in geographic distribution and larval host plants may promote the rapid diversification of montane insects, but this scenario has been rarely investigated. We studied the rapid radiation of the butterfly genus Colias, which has diversified in mountain ecosystems in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. Based on a data set of 150 nuclear protein-coding genetic loci and mitochondrial genomes, we constructed a time-calibrated phylogenetic tree of Colias species with broad taxon sampling. We then inferred their ancestral geographic ranges, historical diversification rates, and the evolution of host use. We found that the most recent common ancestor of Colias was likely geographically widespread and originated ~3.5 Ma. The group subsequently diversified in different regions across the world, often in tandem with geographic expansion events. No aspect of elevation was found to have a direct effect on diversification. The genus underwent a burst of diversification soon after the divergence of the Neotropical lineage, followed by an exponential decline in diversification rate toward the present. The ancestral host repertoire included the legume genera Astragalus and Trifolium but later expanded to include a wide range of Fabaceae genera and plants in more distantly related families, punctuated with periods of host range expansion and contraction. We suggest that the widespread distribution of the ancestor of all extant Colias lineages set the stage for diversification by isolation of populations that locally adapted to the various different environments they encountered, including different host plants. In this scenario, elevation is not the main driver but might have accelerated diversification by isolating populations.</p>","PeriodicalId":22120,"journal":{"name":"Systematic Biology","volume":" ","pages":"141-157"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11809587/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142558837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inference of Phylogenetic Networks From Sequence Data Using Composite Likelihood.","authors":"Sungsik Kong, David L Swofford, Laura S Kubatko","doi":"10.1093/sysbio/syae054","DOIUrl":"10.1093/sysbio/syae054","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>While phylogenies have been essential in understanding how species evolve, they do not adequately describe some evolutionary processes. For instance, hybridization, a common phenomenon where interbreeding between 2 species leads to formation of a new species, must be depicted by a phylogenetic network, a structure that modifies a phylogenetic tree by allowing 2 branches to merge into 1, resulting in reticulation. However, existing methods for estimating networks become computationally expensive as the dataset size and/or topological complexity increase. The lack of methods for scalable inference hampers phylogenetic networks from being widely used in practice, despite accumulating evidence that hybridization occurs frequently in nature. Here, we propose a novel method, PhyNEST (Phylogenetic Network Estimation using SiTe patterns), that estimates binary, level-1 phylogenetic networks with a fixed, user-specified number of reticulations directly from sequence data. By using the composite likelihood as the basis for inference, PhyNEST is able to use the full genomic data in a computationally tractable manner, eliminating the need to summarize the data as a set of gene trees prior to network estimation. To search network space, PhyNEST implements both hill climbing and simulated annealing algorithms. PhyNEST assumes that the data are composed of coalescent independent sites that evolve according to the Jukes-Cantor substitution model and that the network has a constant effective population size. Simulation studies demonstrate that PhyNEST is often more accurate than 2 existing composite likelihood summary methods (SNaQand PhyloNet) and that it is robust to at least one form of model misspecification (assuming a less complex nucleotide substitution model than the true generating model). We applied PhyNEST to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships among Heliconius butterflies and Papionini primates, characterized by hybrid speciation and widespread introgression, respectively. PhyNEST is implemented in an open-source Julia package and is publicly available at https://github.com/sungsik-kong/PhyNEST.jl.</p>","PeriodicalId":22120,"journal":{"name":"Systematic Biology","volume":" ","pages":"53-69"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142401387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R Alexander Pyron, Kyle A O'Connell, Edward A Myers, David A Beamer, Hector Baños
{"title":"Complex Hybridization in a Clade of Polytypic Salamanders (Plethodontidae: Desmognathus) Uncovered by Estimating Higher-Level Phylogenetic Networks.","authors":"R Alexander Pyron, Kyle A O'Connell, Edward A Myers, David A Beamer, Hector Baños","doi":"10.1093/sysbio/syae060","DOIUrl":"10.1093/sysbio/syae060","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Reticulation between radiating lineages is a common feature of diversification. We examine these phenomena in the Pisgah clade of Desmognathus salamanders from the southern Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. The group contains 4-7 species exhibiting 2 discrete phenotypes, aquatic \"shovel-nosed\" and semi-aquatic \"black-bellied\" forms. These ecomorphologies are ancient and have apparently been transmitted repeatedly between lineages through introgression. Geographically proximate populations of both phenotypes exhibit admixture, and at least 2 black-bellied lineages have been produced via reticulations between shovel-nosed parentals, suggesting potential hybrid speciation dynamics. However, computational constraints currently limit our ability to reconstruct network radiations from gene-tree data. Available methods are limited to level-1 networks wherein reticulations do not share edges, and higher-level networks may be non-identifiable in many cases. We present a heuristic approach to recover information from higher-level networks across a range of potentially identifiable empirical scenarios, supported by theory and simulation. When extrinsic information indicates the location and direction of reticulations, our method can successfully estimate a reduced possible set of nonlevel-1 networks. Phylogenomic data support a single backbone topology with up to 5 overlapping hybrid edges in the Pisgah clade. These results suggest an unusual mechanism of ecomorphological hybrid speciation, wherein a binary threshold trait causes some hybrid populations to shift between microhabitat niches, promoting ecological divergence between sympatric hybrids and parentals. This contrasts with other well-known systems in which hybrids exhibit intermediate, novel, or transgressive phenotypes. The genetic basis of these phenotypes is unclear and further data are needed to clarify the evolutionary basis of morphological changes with ecological consequences.</p>","PeriodicalId":22120,"journal":{"name":"Systematic Biology","volume":" ","pages":"124-140"},"PeriodicalIF":6.1,"publicationDate":"2025-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142523144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}