The increasingly widespread availability of genomic data is transforming how biologists estimate evolutionary relationships among organisms and broadening the range of questions that researchers can test in a phylogenetic framework. Species Tree Inference brings together many of today's leading scholars in the field to provide an incisive guide to the latest practices for analyzing multilocus sequence data.
This wide-ranging and authoritative book gives detailed explanations of emerging new approaches and assesses their strengths and challenges, offering an invaluable context for gauging which procedure to apply given the types of genomic data and processes that contribute to differences in the patterns of inheritance across loci. It demonstrates how to apply these approaches using empirical studies that span a range of taxa, timeframes of diversification, and processes that cause the evolutionary history of genes across genomes to differ.
By fully embracing this genomic heterogeneity, Species Tree Inference illustrates how to address questions beyond the goal of estimating phylogenetic relationships of organisms, enabling students and researchers to pursue their own research in statistically sophisticated ways while charting new directions of scientific discovery.
Laura S. Kubatko is Professor of Statistics and of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at The Ohio State University. L. Lacey Knowles is the Robert B. Payne Collegiate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Insects at the University of Michigan. They are the coeditors of Estimating Species Trees: Practical and Theoretical Aspects.
"Kubatko and Knowles have gathered many of the leading contributors to the field to offer novel perspectives on the most important aspects of species tree estimation along with exemplary case studies and incisive summaries of the literature. The methods presented here are crucial for modern comparative analyses."
– Mark T. Holder, University of Kansas
"An excellent contribution to the field. Given the importance of phylogenetics to nearly every biological subdiscipline, this book will be useful to a large diversity of biologists."
– Paul O. Lewis, coeditor of Bayesian Phylogenetics: Methods, Algorithms, and Applications