Taxacom: How to do a good job of distribution documentation

[John Grehan]

I know I probably complain about this and that too often, so here is a
plaudit for a paper doing well when it comes to presenting distribution
data. In this case Jiang et al 2022  Phylogeny and biogeography of Fagus
(Fagaceae) based on 28 nuclear single/low‐copy loci. In this paper they do
not do the lazy way of making up a few general areas to analyse, but they
map the actual distributions along with the phylogeny. This means that no
matter what one might think of their biogeography, one can at least access
the real data of biogeography - the distributions of the taxa.

If there were not so many lazy systematists out there, one would not have
to even comment on something so obvious. Actually, perhaps I should not say
lazy as that implies authors know on one level that actual distribution
data has value. More likely is the long metaphysical tradition of
systematists (and many biogeographers) that just does not recognise
distributions as an evolutionary reality.

Cheers, John Grehan

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