Understanding the way biodiversity accumulates during the evolutionary radiation of clades provides a basis for explaining the phylogenetic and geographic patterns of diversity that we see in the world today.
In this talk I will describe work we have done to understand the diversity of the great Gondwanan plant family Proteaceae, with particular emphasis on the two large Australian genera Banksia and Hakea, and a particular focus on the biodiversity hotspot in Australia's southwest. Along the way we have inferred phylogeny, reconstructed biogeographic history, modelled evolution of environmental niches, developed new methods of inferring speciation modes, and developed new phylospatial methods for comparative analyses.
Prof. Marcel Cardillo's from the Australian National University presents his work in the video below.