bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.07.21.739740
BioGeoSyn: a graphical software for reproducible biogeographic analyses and cross-clade synthesis of biogeographic events
Abstract
O_LIHistorical biogeography increasingly looks beyond one clade at a time, pooling range-evolution and speciation events from lineages that share a region to ask whether the same geological and climatic events shaped them together. Despite the momentum behind this cross-clade synthesis, it still has no dedicated software. C_LIO_LIWe present BioGeoSyn, an open-source graphical application (with an equivalent scripting interface) that makes a complete, reproducible BioGeoBEARS analysis point- and-click: guided data upload and validation, model fitting and comparison, biogeographic stochastic mapping (BSM), and standardized tables, publication figures and a report. C_LIO_LIIts one novel capability is cross-clade synthesis. Once every clades events carry the same seven process labels and sit on a common time axis, BioGeoSyn integrates event rates through time, overall and region-resolved, across independently analysed clades, each carrying a 95% interval propagated from the stochastic maps, to reveal shared biogeographic pulses. C_LIO_LIBioGeoSyn lowers the barrier to reproducible historical biogeography for non-programmers and provides a ready-to-use route to multi-clade biogeographic-event synthesis. C_LI Data and code for peer reviewthe complete source code, the example data and the worked-example analyses are available to editors and reviewers at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BioGeoSyn-696B/, an anonymised mirror of the development repository. An archived release is deposited in a public repository; its DOI is withheld here for double-blind review.
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Xu, W., Wu, Y.-H.. 2026-07-24. BioGeoSyn: a graphical software for reproducible biogeographic analyses and cross-clade synthesis of biogeographic events. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.07.21.739740
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