R.F.A. (Ryan) Brewer

I then applied this phylogenetic framework to identify environmental correlates of five plant growth forms, revealing that niche space is largely overlapping but delineated by temperature/precipitation seasonality and terrain rugosity, with insular woodiness potentially an adaptation to mild climatic seasonality and rugosity. Additionally, I combined this phylogenetic framework with morphological trait data to test a novel trait-dependent diversification model specifically tailored to islands, TRAISIE (TRait-dependent Assembly of Island biota through Speciation, Immigration, and Extinction). First, we applied TRAISIE to simulated data to find the dataset conditions required for accurate evolutionary rate estimation. Then we applied TRAISIE to the Canary Islands dataset and found faster diversification rates in woody and perennial lineages. Together, these findings provide the first empirical support for insular woodiness promoting diversification at the community level, link plant distributions to rugosity, and help develop a general trait-dependent diversification model for islands.