Endemicity Analysis, Parsimony and Biotic Elements: A Formal Comparison using Hypothetical Distributions

CASAGRANDA M. DOLORES; LEILA M. TAHER; CLAUDIA A. SZUMIK

CLADISTICS (PRINT)

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2012

0748-3007

The delimitation of areas of endemism continues to be performed and discussed, without general agreement about which method should be used in general, or even in any particular circumstances. Here, we discuss three alternative methods, comparing their performance, and highlighting their respective limitations as well as strengths. We compared the performance of Endemicity Analysis (EA), Parsimony Analysis of Endemicity (PAE), and Biotic Elements Analysis (BE), according their ability to recover hypothetical predefined patterns representing cases of nested, overlapping, and disjunct areas of endemism. For each case, we considered subcases with different degrees of sympatry between endemic species. We found that PAE presents evident difficulties to recognize overlapping patterns, as well as in areas of endemism composed by species with imperfect sympatry. BE shows counterintuitive sensitivity to degrees of spatial congruence among distribution of endemic species, being unable to recognize areas defined by perfectly sympatric species. EA seems to be the most adequate method for the recognition of areas of endemism, reaching a high percentage of success in recovering the different types of spatial patterns here analyzed. Obtained results show that different analytical methods can lead to the identification of different areas of endemism and alert about the possibility of obtaining distributional patterns which are merely methodological artefacts, highlighting the importance of methodological choice when analysing data.