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

Concise, but informative summary of the preprint

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

• Figures! Visually compelling, clean and easy to understand.

• We like the way the text is broken down into sections. The breaks make sense to us.

• Overall, the writing is quite clear, and we like 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!

Things to be improved

• We could use more figures! We think they could help us understand most of the new ideas on the paper.

• Maybe the figures could’ve helped, but it was not clear how genetic fluctuation rates could be a trustworthy marker for geological events, which seem to have a much lower fluctuation rate.

• Although it is alluded in the text, we think 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.

Small-picture things

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 authors declare that they have no competing interests.