Field guides and phylogenies

Using Field Experiments to Evaluate Mobile Guides

This paper discusses the experimental evaluation of locationbased services, such as mobile guides, in the field. It identifies advantages and disadvantages of using such field experiments over and against other evaluation methods. We then describe a specific method of running field experiments that we have found to be useful. The use of various evaluation measures, tools and scales is then disc...

Reconstructing and Using Phylogenies

Perspectives from fossils and phylogenies

Over half of all described species are insects, but until recently our understanding of the reasons for this diversity was based on very little macroevolutionary evidence. Here I summarize the hypotheses that have been posed, tests of these hypotheses and their results, and hence identify gaps in knowledge for future researchers to pursue. I focus on inferences from the following sources: (i) t...

Accumulation Phylogenies

Directed acyclic graphs provide a convenient representation of reticulate evolution in systematic biology. In this paper we formalize and analyse a simple model in which evolved characteristics are passed on to all descendant species. We show that the resulting observed sets of characteristics for the species at the leaves uniquely determine the digraph that described the evolution of the speci...

Breakpoint Phylogenies.

We describe a number of heuristicsfor inferring the gene orders of the hypothetical ancestral genomes in a fixed phylogeny. The optimization criterion is the minimum number of breakpoints (pairs of genes adjacent in one genome but not the other) in the gene orders of two genomes connected by an edge of the tree, summed over all edges. The key to the method is an exact solution for trees with th...