Research
Lineage-specific diversification rates
As part of my doctoral work, I investigated whether opportunities for speciation (or the risks of extinction) vary within phylogenies. To do so, we developed the software Pesto (Phylogenetic Estimation of Shifts in the Tempo of Origination). Pesto has two implementations. First, we developed Pesto.jl in the Julia programming language. Second, we wrote RPesto with the aim of being more accessible for people who are more familiar with R. Pesto can estimate branch-specific speciation and extinction rates, and infer on which branches there were diversification rate shift events. The main advantage of Pesto over similar methods is its computational speed: Pesto can easily be used to investigate diversification dynamics in species-rich phylogenies (10,000-100,000).
Identifiability of time-varying birth-death models
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