Support for open science is growing, but motivating researchers to participate in open science can be challenging. This in-depth qualitative study draws on interviews with researchers and staff at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital during the development of its open science policy. Using thematic content analysis, we explore attitudes toward open science, the motivations and disincentives to participate, the role of patients, and attitudes to the eschewal of intellectual property rights. To be successful, an open science policy must clearly lay out expectations, boundaries and mechanisms by which researchers can engage, and must be shaped to explicitly support their values and those of key partners, including patients, research participants and industry collaborators.
Explaining the uneven distribution of species richness across the branches of the tree of life has been a major challenge for evolutionary biologists. Advances in phylogenetic reconstruction, allowing the generation of large, well-sampled, phylogenetic trees have provided an opportunity to contrast competing hypotheses. Here, we present a new time-calibrated phylogeny of seed plant families using Bayesian methods and 26 fossil calibrations. While there are various published phylogenetic trees for plants which have a greater density of species sampling, we are still a long way from generating a complete phylogeny for all ~300,000+ plants. Our phylogeny samples all seed plant families and is a useful tool for comparative analyses. We use this new phylogenetic hypothesis to contrast two alternative explanations for differences in species richness among higher taxa: time for speciation versus ecological limits. We calculated net diversification rate for each clade in the phylogeny and assessed the relationship between clade age and species richness. We then fit models of speciation and extinction to individual branches in the tree to identify major rate-shifts. Our data suggest that the majority of lineages are diversifying very slowly while a few lineages, distributed throughout the tree, are diversifying rapidly. Diversification is unrelated to clade age, no matter the age range of the clades being examined, contrary to both the assumption of an unbounded lineage increase through time, and the paradigm of fixed ecological limits. These findings are consistent with the idea that ecology plays a role in diversification, but rather than imposing a fixed limit, it may have variable effects on per lineage diversification rates through time.
Abstract. Phylogenetic community structure can provide insight into the ecological dynamics that drive species co-occurrence and community assembly patterns. Understanding these patterns is important for predicting future community composition in the context of climate change and other anthropogenic disturbances. However, we know little about how these environmental stressors might change interspecific interactions. Here we present an analysis on the role of putative foundation species (cushion-type life forms) in determining the phylogenetic community composition of vascular plants at the local scale. We also investigated how community diversity and structure shifts across an environmental severity gradient. Abundance data for vascular plants was collected within and outside of four focal cushion plant species along an elevation gradient in Canadian alpine tundra. We compared differences in species-specific abundance within plots with foundation plants to the same measure in adjacent open plots. Using a timecalibrated molecular phylogeny, we quantified community structure metrics, including the net relatedness index (NRI), a novel net relatedness to focal index (NRFI), and an index of species co-occurrence across the gradient. We examined the trends in these indices with cushion plant presence/absence and environmental severity using both linear regression and mixed effect models. We found that the loss of species richness at higher elevations was counterbalanced by a decrease in interspecific relatedness, maintaining phylogenetic diversity across the gradient. We found no evidence for community diversity or structure modifications by cushion plants, nor any evidence that species were preferentially associating with these hypothesized foundation species. On the contrary, many species had significantly negative co-occurrence with the cushion plants. Overall, our results suggest that the cushion plant life forms may exhibit interspecific dynamics that are at least as competitive as they are facilitative. The decrease in phylogenetic clustering with elevation suggests that traits that allow persistence in these conditions are convergent at the local scale.
A reference is omitted from the first sentence of the last paragraph in the "Diversification Rate Calculations" section of the Methods. The sentence should read: "Last, we identified major shifts in diversification rate across the tree using MEDUSA [54] in the geiger (Pennell et al., 2014) package in R [55], with the phylogeny and species richness estimates for each tip as inputs."The reference is: Pennell MW, Eastman JM, Slater GJ, Brown JW, Uyeda JC, FitzJohn RG, Alfaro ME, Harmon LJ. geiger v2. 0: an expanded suite of methods for fitting macroevolutionary models to phylogenetic trees. Bioinformatics. 2014 10:btu181.
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