Ancestral niche inference illustration
Our illustration of ancestral character inference using bin-based coding was able to detect both simulated niche shifts and niche conservatism, although it demonstrated that maximum likelihood reconstructions performed more reliably than parsimony reconstructions. Using maximum parsimony, we were able to recover accurately the simulated expansion from a 25ºC ancestral lower limit of the fundamental niche limit to 24ºC at the ancestor of simulated taxa “t3” and “t4” (Supplement 6). However, the parsimony-based reconstruction failed to recover this change, instead ascribing a false expansion to 24ºC at the ancestor of taxa “t5” and “t6”. This was the only discrepancy in reconstructions between the two algorithms. See Supplement 6 for further detail.