Ricardo Andres Segovia

The Andes are a relatively young mountain range with impressive biodiversity, but the biogeographic processes underlying its hyperdiversity are still being unraveled. Novel mid- to high-elevation climates may have served as a biological corridor for the immigration of temperate-adapted lineages to lower latitudes, contributing unknown levels of diversity to this region. We tested the hypothesis that Weinmannia is a lineage of extratropical origin that recently reached and then diversified extensively in tropical Andes. Using a 2bRAD seq approach to generate a time-calibrated phylogeny for the genus, we found that extratropical species were placed as sister to the rest of Weinmannia and that younger clades were distributed towards northern latitudes. Although Weinmannia exhibited low niche conservatism in elevation and latitude, trait reconstructions of mean annual temperature showed that the common ancestor of Weinmannia occupied cool climates, with high conservatism of thermal niche across the phylogeny. Thus, Andean uplift likely created habitats with suitable temperatures, providing a dispersal route for Weinmannia to colonize the tropical Andes from the southern extratropics. These southern lineages likely converged with those originating in other tropical and extratropical centers of diversification, providing multiple origins for the hyperdiversity in the modern montane forests of the tropical Andes.