Extended Data Fig. 8: Path analysis of hypothetical causal links among geological and climatic factors and grid-based speciation rates over the last 3 million years.
From: Global topographic uplift has elevated speciation in mammals and birds over the last 3 million years
There were 762 and 1923 species of mammals and birds with an age <3 Myr, respectively. Including only these species in our analyses resulted in excluding 363 and 242 cells where all mammals and bird species were older, respectively. We then calculated the weighted mean λBAMM in a) uplifted (n = 3719 cells) and b) eroded (n = 10,528 cells for mammals and birds, respectively). As in our main analyses, we found that historic changes in elevation had comparable effects on speciation to current elevation (compare panel a) to Extended Data Fig 5a and panel b) to Extended Data Fig 6a). This result was unsurprising given the strong correlation between speciation rates. Weighted mean λBAMM for species younger than 3 Myr was strongly positively correlated with rates calculated for all species reported in the main text (ρ = 0.87 and 0.93 for mammals and birds, respectively, p <0.001 for both. Lines and colours as in Fig. 2.
