So to make it short, ecological speciation might be a useful tool to potentially infer spatial structure below the species level and also that clustering algorithms are good at catching discrete ecological entities, particularly GMMs.

Thank you and I hope you like it!

Personally, I was also surprised to see how well taxonomists have been identifying the optimal number of clusters (subspecies), often matching the most stable number of ecological entities found by the clustering methods across replicates.

ecological signals unique for each subspecies within the complex. So we don't need too much resolution in our data to predict where subspecies could be distributing.

Moreover, we did this with non-specific environmental variables and found interesting things, what if we fine-tuned the approach?

So the first cool thing we found is that in many cases we had great correspondence between the ecological entities found and the currently described subspecies for the different complexes analyzed.

That means, that through the environment and through clustering methods we were able to detect...

So, for validation purposes, we decided to test that with 298 species for which taxonomical entities below the species level and their geographical ranges were already known.

The thing was, would they match at all the ecological groups found through clustering?

Of course we found groups, but we didn't know if those groups found made any taxonomical sense at all because they were, well... unknown 😅.

How cool would it be to build a cost-effective screening approach to identify discrete ecological groups from unknown complexes solely from occurrence and environmental data?

By doing so, we could delimit subspecies ranges or employ ecological speciation to assess confusing taxonomical complexes.

For sure there is room for improvement, but I am particularly happy with what we did.

The original question was simple: What if we could tell, by the way individuals and populations occupy different environmental spaces, if one species is actually composed by two different species... or maybe more?

@facua.org @pbustinduy.bsky.social

Thank you so much for the info, indeed looks promising ❤️

Great question. #ATproto is the open, decentralised social web protocol that powers Bluesky. It’s built around a portable identity, personal data servers (PDS) where *all* *my* stuff is stored, and “lexicons” (definition of any “thing” that can be written/read by anyone/anything on the network).

Sorry about the obvious question, but what's AT Protocol and why is that a huge opportunity?