Aquilegia, Vol. 26 No. 2, March-April 2002: Newsletter of the Colorado Native Plant Society

https://epublications.regis.edu/aquilegia/1092/thumbnail.jp

Aquilegia, Vol. 24 No. 5, November-December 2000: Newsletter of the Colorado Native Plant Society

https://epublications.regis.edu/aquilegia/1182/thumbnail.jp

Aquilegia, Vol. 24 No. 4, July-October 2000: Newsletter of the Colorado Native Plant Society

https://epublications.regis.edu/aquilegia/1181/thumbnail.jp

Aquilegia, Vol. 22 No. 6, November-December 1998: Newsletter of the Colorado Native Plant Society

https://epublications.regis.edu/aquilegia/1087/thumbnail.jp

Aquilegia, Vol. 23 No. 5, September-October 1999: Newsletter of the Colorado Native Plant Society

https://epublications.regis.edu/aquilegia/1176/thumbnail.jp

A tale of worldwide success: Behind the scenes of Carex (Cyperaceae) biogeography and diversification

The megadiverse genus Carex (c. 2000 species, Cyperaceae) has a nearly cosmopolitan distribution, displaying an inverted latitudinal richness gradient with higher species diversity in cold-temperate areas of the Northern Hemisphere. Despite great expansion in our knowledge of the phylogenetic history of the genus and many molecular studies focusing on the biogeography of particular groups during the last few decades, a global analysis of Carex biogeography and diversification is still lacking. For this purpose, we built the hitherto most comprehensive Carex-dated phylogeny based on three markers (ETS–ITS–matK), using a previous phylogenomic Hyb-Seq framework, and a sampling of two-thirds of its species and all recognized sections. Ancestral area reconstruction, biogeographic stochastic mapping, and diversification rate analyses were conducted to elucidate macroevolutionary biogeographic and diversification patterns. Our results reveal that Carex originated in the late Eocene in E Asia, where it probably remained until the synchronous diversification of its main subgeneric lineages during the late Oligocene. E Asia is supported as the cradle of Carex diversification, as well as a “museum” of extant species diversity. Subsequent “out-of-Asia” colonization patterns feature multiple asymmetric dispersals clustered toward present times among the Northern Hemisphere regions, with major regions acting both as source and sink (especially Asia and North America), as well as several independent colonization events of the Southern Hemisphere. We detected 13 notable diversification rate shifts during the last 10 My, including remarkable radiations in North America and New Zealand, which occurred concurrently with the late Neogene global cooling, which suggests that diversification involved the colonization of new areas and expansion into novel areas of niche space.This work was carried out with financial support by the National Science Foundation (Award #1255901 to ALH and Award #1256033 to EHR), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project CGL2016–77401‐P to SM-B and ML), the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (McIntire Stennis project 1018692 to DS) as well as postdoctoral fellowships towards SM‐B (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, PP16/12‐APP), and PJ‐M (National Science Foundation, Award #1256033, and the Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship program)