Ancestral niche inference illustration
Our illustration of ancestral character inference using bin-based coding
was able to detect both simulated niche shifts and niche conservatism,
although it demonstrated that maximum likelihood reconstructions
performed more reliably than parsimony reconstructions. Using maximum
parsimony, we were able to recover accurately the simulated expansion
from a 25ºC ancestral lower limit of the fundamental niche limit to 24ºC
at the ancestor of simulated taxa “t3” and “t4” (Supplement 6).
However, the parsimony-based reconstruction failed to recover this
change, instead ascribing a false expansion to 24ºC at the ancestor of
taxa “t5” and “t6”. This was the only discrepancy in reconstructions
between the two algorithms. See Supplement 6 for further detail.