PREreview of Botany and Geogenomics: constraining geological hypotheses with large-scale genetic data derived from plants

This review was made as part of a community of practice supported by ASAPbio and BIOS². One of the authors, GH, is a signatory of Publish Your Reviews, and has committed to publish her peer reviews alongside the preprint version of an article. For more information, see publishyourreviews.org.

Authors’ background:

Open science, open data, network ecology, plant ecology, conservation biology, taxonomy, ecological modelling, plant biology, seed science and technology, agronomy, urban evolutionary biology, biodiversity change, indicators, population dynamics, island biogeography, computational and quantitative ecology, prediction, community ecology, eDNA, metacommunity.

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Summary:

The author proposes a paradigm shift in which geogenomic data would help us define timestamps of geological events. This is based on the understanding that population dynamics and speciation events in plants are very closely related to geological events. The author defends an integrative approach that combines genetic information and geological data to understand species distribution in space and time.

Big-picture comments

Good/Excellent things

Overall, the writing is quite clear, and we appreciate the level of detail in this paper. It feels like a general paper that has many specific examples and points to specific evidence, which is compelling! Specifically, we liked the way the text is broken down into sections and the figures, which are visually compelling, clean and easy to understand.

Things to be improved

Although it is alluded in the text, it might be beneficial to explicitly highlight what makes a ‘good’ system where this type of genomic-focused approach would help us understand geologic history e.g. timescale, the species life history that lends us to being able to make these inferences. Although this would by no means be extensive it would help to give an idea of what people should think about.

Additionally, the paper could use more figures. It could potentially have helped to clarify, for example, how genetic fluctuation rates could be a trustworthy marker for geological events, which seem to have a much lower fluctuation rate.

Small-picture things

To be improved

• The first paragraph could be reworked to feel lighter and to read more smoothly, to make it easier to be introduced to the subject.

• The enumeration of examples of diversification specifically could be broken up to be more fluid.

• The examples are interesting to include, but it is difficult to assimilate all the patterns of diversification because the flow is interrupted with parentheses - which makes it difficult to dive into the introduction.

Competing interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.