Abstract
Unravelling the drivers of species diversification through geological time is of crucial importance for our understanding of long-term evolutionary processes. Numerous studies have proposed different sets of biotic and abiotic controls of speciation and extinction rates, but typically they were inferred for a single, long geological time frame. However, whether the impact of biotic and abiotic controls on diversification changes over time is poorly understood. Here, we use a large fossil dataset, a multivariate birth–death model and a comprehensive set of biotic and abiotic predictors, including a new index to quantify tectonic complexity, to estimate the drivers of diversification for European freshwater gastropods over the past 100 Myr. The effects of these factors on origination and extinction are estimated across the entire time frame as well as within sequential time windows of 20 Myr each. Our results find support for temporal heterogeneity in the factors associated with changes in diversification rates. While the factors impacting speciation and extinction rates vary considerably over time, diversity-dependence and topography are consistently important. Our study highlights that a high level of heterogeneity in diversification rates is best captured by incorporating time-varying effects of biotic and abiotic factors.
Highlights
A major question in evolutionary biology concerns the processes that drive species diversification [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
We evaluated whether smaller time windows offer an improvement over the entire time frame by quantifying the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE; compare Andermann et al [39]) of the reconstructed multivariate birth–death (MBD) rates in comparison to the rates inferred under the birth–death model with shifts (BDS) model
Our results show a strong variation in the effect of drivers of speciation and extinction rates through geological time
Summary
A major question in evolutionary biology concerns the processes that drive species diversification [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Predictor type inferred based on continental area geographic palaeo-DEMs number of basins basin size topographic topographic palaeo-DEMs palaeo-DEMsa diversity elevation biotic topographic birth–death model with shifts palaeo-DEMsa geographical distance geographic palaeocoordinates tectonic complexity index annual precipitation mean annual temperature topographic ruggedness index topographic/geographic climatic climatic topographic palaeo-DEMs palaeo-climate dataa palaeo-climate dataa palaeo-DEMsa aPredictors that are based on the mean of the values measured at the palaeocoordinates of fossil localities per time slice; see Material and methods and electronic supplementary material for details. We chose 10 predictors to test for their potential influence on speciation and extinction rates in each window, including one biotic (diversity) and nine abiotic factors (mean annual temperature, annual precipitation, continental area, mean elevation range, average basin size and number of basins, TRI, mean geographical distance among fossil occurrences and a novel TCI; table 1; electronic supplementary material, tables S1.1–3). This method does not account for the actual area of land versus sea, which is why we chose to develop a new index that is explicitly focusing on the continental area
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