Using a mega-phylogeny of seed plants to test for non-random patterns of areal-types across the Chinese tree of life

The species composition of plant assemblages can in large part be explained by a long history of biogeographic and evolutionary events. Over the past decade, botanists and plant ecologists have increasingly sought to quantify phylogenetic signal in ecological traits to help inform their inferences regarding the mechanisms driving plant assemblages. However, most studies with a test of phylogenetic signal in the ecological traits have focused on a local scale, while comparatively few studies have been carried out on a regional scale. In this study, I presented a family-level phylogeny and a genus-level phylogeny that included all families and genera of extant seed plants in China, and use both phylogenies to examine whether areal-types or distribution patterns of families and genera of seed plants are non-randomly distributed across the Chinese tree of life. My study shows that the areal-types of families and genera of seed plants exhibit significant phylogenetic signal across the family- or genus-level phylogeny of seed plants in China.