As it is State of Origin time, I thought it would be good to stoke botanical rivalries. For the non-Australian, State of Origin is a mid-season Rugby League All Star game between players who originated form Queensland against the New South Wales born. The rest of the players are out of luck. It is a three game series and is a serious rivalry.
I study Wattles (Acacia) and with collaborators developed Phylolink, a collection of tools through which biodiversity can be explored from a phylogenetic perspective. It is part of the Atlas of Living Australia and with it we can do many fun things, including stoke state rivalries.
Using these tools I counted the number of Wattle species in each state and used my phylogenetic tree (the evolutionary relationships of the all Wattle species). In later blogs I will demonstrate how I do this, it is easy.
What is your guess?
Which state, Queensland or New South Wales, Maroons or Blues, has more Wattle species, which contains more evolutionary history (or phylogenetic diversity (PD)), how many species and how much phylogenetic diversity is shared?
Here are the results (for those in the know, I am using only the species that are in the phylogeny).
Species comparison:
By raw species counts there are:
141 species shared between NSW & QLD
81 unique to QLD
73 unique to NSW
By percentage:
48% of the species are shared between NSW & QLD
27% unique to QLD
25% unique to NSW
By phylogenetic diversity there is:
52% species shared between NSW & QLD
26% unique to QLD
22% unique to NSW
Queensland wins! Maybe? By both species counts and PD there is more diversity in Queensland. The big result is that half the Wattle diversity is shared between Queensland and New South Wales.
I'll dissect the differences between the species and PD results in a later post. Think about it.
In the meantime, any other States of Origin to compare?
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