View article

• Premise of the study: The broad austral distribution of Schoeneae is almost certainly a product of long‐distance dispersal. Owing to the inadequacies of existing phylogenetic data and a lack of rigorous biogeographic analysis, relationships within the tribe remain poorly resolved and its pattern of radiation and dispersal uncertain. We employed an expanded sampling of taxa and markers and a rigorous analytic approach to address these limitations. We evaluated the roles of geography and ecology in stimulating the initial radiation of the group and its subsequent dispersal across the southern hemisphere.

• Methods: A dated tree was reconstructed using reversible‐jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with a polytomy prior and molecular dating, applied to data from two nuclear and three cpDNA regions. Ancestral areas and habitats were inferred using dispersal–extinction–cladogenesis models.

• Key results …