Reconstructing ecological niche evolution can provide insight into the biogeography and diversification of evolving lineages. However, comparative phylogenetic methods may infer the history of ecological niche evolution inaccurately because (a) species' niches are often poorly characterized; and (b) phylogenetic comparative methods rely on niche summary statistics rather than full estimates of species' environmental tolerances. Here, we propose a new framework for coding ecological niches and reconstructing their evolution that explicitly acknowledges and incorporates the uncertainty introduced by incomplete niche characterization. Then, we modify existing ancestral state inference methods to leverage full estimates of environmental tolerances. We provide a worked empirical example of our method, investigating ecological niche evolution in the New World orioles (Aves: Passeriformes: Icterus spp.). Temperature and precipitation tolerances were generally broad and conserved among orioles, with niche reduction and specialization limited to a few terminal branches. Tools for performing these reconstructions are available in a new R package called nichevol .

中文翻译：

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认识到生态位进化重建中的不确定性。

重建生态位进化可以为生物地理学和进化世系的多样化提供见识。但是，比较的系统发育方法可能会错误地推断生态位进化的历史，因为（a）物种的生态位通常没有很好的特征；（b）系统发育比较方法依靠生态位摘要统计，而不是对物种环境耐受性的完整估计。在这里，我们提出了一个用于编码生态位和重建其生态位的新框架，该框架明确承认并纳入了由不完全生态位表征引入的不确定性。然后，我们修改现有的祖先状态推断方法，以充分利用对环境耐受性的估计。我们提供了一个可行的方法实例，黄蜂属）。温度和降水的耐受性通常很宽，在金莺之间是保守的，生态位的减少和专业化仅限于一些末端分支。新的R软件包nichevol中提供了执行这些重建的工具。