Phylogenetic Supertrees

• New uses for old phylogenies: an introduction to the volume.- 1. Reviews of existing methods.- The MRP method.- An assessment of matrix representation with compatibility in supertree construction.- MRF supertrees.- Everything you always wanted to know about average consensus, and more.- Tangled trees from multiple markers: reconciling conflict between phylogenies to build molecular supertrees.- 2. New supertree methods.- Supertree methods for ancestral divergence dates and other applications.- Supertree algorithms for nested taxa.- Quartet supertrees.- Bayesian supertrees.- 3. Methodological considerations.- Some desiderata for liberal supertrees.- Taxonomy, supertrees, and the Tree of Life.- Garbage in, garbage out: data issues in supertree construction.- Reconstructing divergence times for supertrees: a molecular approach.- Performance of supertree methods on various data set decompositions.- 4. A critical look at supertrees.- Unrooted supertrees: limitations, traps, and phylogenetic patchworks.- The cladistics of matrix representation with parsimony analysis.- A critique of matrix representation with parsimony supertrees.- Supertrees, components and three-item data.- 5. Supertrees and their applications.- A molecular supertree of the Artiodactyla.- Supertrees: using complete phylogenies in comparative biology.- Using supertrees to investigate species richness in grasses and flowering plants.- Detecting diversification rate variation in supertrees.- Taxon index.

From the reviews: "It provides a very worthwhile introduction to a topic that is receiving a lot of attention among phylogeneticists in the new millennium: how to combine the information contained in multiple phylogenetic trees with partially overlapping sets of taxa. ... this book achieves what it sets out to achieve, which is to provide an overview and evaluation of possible approaches to the construction of supertrees. ... This book does a good job of explaining the arithmetic and the mathematics of supertrees ... ." (David A. Morrison, Systematic Biology, Vol. 55 (3), 2006)