A Class of General Supertree Methods for Nested Taxa

Amalgamating smaller evolutionary trees into a single parent tree is an important task in evolutionary biology. Traditionally, the (supertree) methods used for this amalgamation take a collection of leaf-labelled trees as their input. However, it has been recently highlighted that, in practice, such an input is somewhat limiting and that one would like supertree methods for collections of trees in which some of the interior vertices, as well as all of the leaves, are labelled [10]. In this paper, we describe what appears to be the first approach for constructing such methods and show that any method using this approach satisfies particular desirable properties.