Ambiguous support for extra-tropical accelerated diversification of rosids

Sun et al. 1 used a comprehensive phylogenetic and a locality based climatic dataset to examine how past climates have driven diversification across 17 orders of rosids. They concluded that tropical rosids diversify slower than the (younger) non-tropical counterparts in part due to a strong negative relationship between paleo-temperature and diversification (i.e. higher diversification rates under lower temperatures). Their conclusions are based on tip rates (derived from BAMM 2 ; DR 3 ) and correlations with current temperature (e-SIM 4 ) or binary tropicality data sets (BAMM/STRAPP 5 ; FiSSE 6 ) as well as tree-wide estimates of diversification with paleo-temperature (BAMM; RPANDA 7 ) or tropicality (BiSSE 8 ; HiSSE 9 ). Here, I highlight several inconsistencies in their diversification analyses as well as a systematic error pertaining to the RPANDA model selection procedure, which, together with several minor technical issues, weaken the support for Sun et al.’s 1 conclusions. A re-analysis of their BiSSE/HiSSE and RPANDA analyses are performed.