Phylogenetics is a topical and growing area of research. Phylogenies (phylogenetic trees and networks) allow biologists to study and graph evolutionary relationships between different species. These are also used to investigate other evolutionary processes--for example, how lang…
Phylogenetics is a topical and growing area of research. Phylogenies (phylogenetic trees and networks) allow biologists to study and graph evolutionary relationships between different species. These are also used to investigate other evolutionary processes—for example, how langu…
Recent developments in molecular and statistical methods have made it possible to identify the genetic basis of any biological trait and have given rise to spectacular advances in the study of human disease. The book provides an overview of the concepts and methods needed to und…
Recent developments in molecular and statistical methods have made it possible to identify the genetic basis of any biological trait and have given rise to spectacular advances in the study of human disease. The book provides an overview of the concepts and methods needed to und…
The endemic Hawaiian flowering plant genus Hibiscadelphus was described by Joseph F. Rock based on two species found on Hawaii island and one species from Maui in 1911. In the years since, five additional species have been described, one from Hawaii island, two from Kauai, and o…
Chapter 1: Divergence, gene flow, and the origin of leapfrog geographic distributions: The history of color pattern variation in Phyllobates poison-dart frogs
The majority of parasites infecting humans come from animals, so it is necessary to study how parasites are maintained in nature to understand which human populations are at risk of spillover. Parasites are also highly diverse in their own right, with their own fascinating ecolo…
The inference of evolutionary histories of species is one of the core problems in biology. The supertree or, more formally, the median tree framework appears to be the most robust approach to the inference of species phylogenies known today. In fact, the majority of popular phyl…
Morphology is one of the oldest branches of science, encompassing the form, structure, and transformation of natural materials, whether biotic or abiotic. In the context of contemporary Biology, morphology may be most broadly conceived as the qualitative and quantitative theory …
An important goal in the study of protein evolution is understanding which genetic changes that fixed in nature were selected for and why. However, understanding the functional consequence of any given mutation is a challenge because the effects of amino-acid changes are highly …
Sea kraits are venomous marine adapted snakes belonging to the single genus Laticauda in the family Elapidae. There are eight species in the genus, three are wide-ranging, with distributions spanning from Myanmar to Tonga, and north to the Ryukyu Islands of Japan. The other five…
In this dissertation, I present five chapters. The first chapter stems from a rotation project. In it, we explore a clustered ranking method for small area health outcomes in several applied data sets. By applying clustering to these rankings, we hope to improve rankings' effect…
Spiders are one of the most diverse clades of multicellular life on earth, and their success has been attributed to several key genomic features, such as weaving silk, deploying various forms of venom, and being able to metabolize many types of prey. We have created a database o…
The South African grassland biome, like a multitude of biomes in the world is facing eminent decline in biodiversity due to ongoing transformation and fragmentation. The rich biodiversity in this biome is causally linked to a variety of important ecosystem services that benefit …
Inference of the evolutionary histories of species, commonly represented by a species tree, is complicated by the divergent evolutionary history of different parts of the genome. Different loci on the genome can have different histories from the underlying species tree (and each…