New Workshops on Phylogenetic Networks

The Need for New Workshops

Colleagues and I are putting together a new three-day workshop on phylogenetic networks that will run twice in the UK in November. The host institutions are the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh. The motivation is that there is an increasing need for empirical botanists to consider both reticulate evolution and the coalescent for investigating the evolution of species.

As our ability to detect reticulation and ultimately characterize the biological processes underlying patterns improves, there will likely be some cases where classification, genetics underlying traits of interest, or conservation policy needs re-evaluated. It is very difficult to infer processes from networks, which is why some new educational materials on the topic are needed, but they should be a valuable tool for accelerating the process of biodiversity exploration to speciation genomic investigations.

Please see the workshop website for information.