Species occurence dataset of the pantropical Caesalpinia Group

Description

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 17,207 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Gagnon E, Ringelberg J, Lewis G P, Bruneau A, Hughes C E (2018): Species occurrence dataset of the pantropical Caesalpinia Group. v1. Université de Montréal Biodiversity Centre. Dataset/Occurrence. http://data.canadensys.net/ipt/resource?r=caesalpinia-gagnon&v=1.0

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is Université de Montréal Biodiversity Centre. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.

GBIF Registration

This resource has not been registered with GBIF

Keywords

Occurrence; Specimen

Contacts

Geographic Coverage

Global (pantropical)

Taxonomic Coverage

All 26 genera currently accepted in the Caesalpinia group (subfamily Caesalpinioideae, in the Leguminosae/Fabaceae) including a lineage that is currently being reviewed as a possible 27th genera (Ticanto Clade).

Project Data

The extent to which phylogenetic biome conservatism versus biome shifting determine global patterns of biodiversity remains poorly understood. To address this question, we investigate the biogeography and trajectories of biome and growth form evolution across the Caesalpinia Group (Leguminosae), a clade of 225 species of trees, shrubs and lianas distributed across the Rainforest, Succulent, Temperate and Savanna Biomes. We focus especially on the little-known Succulent Biome, an assemblage of succulent-rich, grass-poor, seasonally dry tropical vegetation distributed disjunctly across the Neotropics, Africa, Arabia and Madagascar. We reconstruct a time-calibrated phylogeny, assemble species occurrence data, and assign species to areas, biomes and growth forms. These data are used to estimate the frequency of trans-continental disjunctions, biome shifts and evolutionary transitions between growth forms and test for phylogenetic biome conservatism and correlated evolution of growth forms and biome shifts. We uncover a pattern of strong phylogenetic Succulent Biome conservatism. We show that trans-continental disjunctions confined within the Succulent Biome are frequent and that biome shifts to the Savanna, Rainforest and Temperate Biomes are infrequent and closely associated with shifts in plant growth forms. Our results suggest that the Succulent Biome comprises a tightly constrained evolutionary arena spanning large geographical disjunctions across the tropics.

The personnel involved in the project:

Sampling Methods

Vouchered (Basis of Record: Preserved Specimen) occurrence records were downloaded from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF; June 2017), SEINet (http://swbiodiversity.org/seinet/) and DryFlor (http://www.dryflor.info/). A total of 17,260 occurrence records were kept as part of the final dataset.

Method step description:

1. Data handling was performed in R (R Core Team, 2018), and scripts are available upon request from the authors of the dataset.

Additional Metadata