Gene tree patterns help answer: vicariance or dispersal?

Abstract Historical biogeography seeks to understand the drivers of species distributions over space and time. One question of interest is how, out of many possible ways, does geography drive speciation. Vicariance, where geographic barriers arise splitting populations and limiting gene flow, can lead to allopatric speciation. Founder events, where a small number of individuals disperse over a barrier, can similarly lead to allopatric speciation if the individuals remain isolated. Both of these scenarios can lead to identical ranges of and relationships between modern species. Classic biogeographic approaches often focus on the history of populations of one or few species on shallow time scales or multiple species on deep time scales. We argue that focusing exclusively on either end of this time spectrum misses a venue for investigating the biogeographic drivers of speciation, at least for certain speciation events. With simple coalescent simulations with multiple species, we show as a proof of concept that gene tree distributions vary predictably between vicariance and founder event speciation. The existence of predictable patterns warrants the development of new approaches that capitalize the gene trees to distinguish vicariance and dispersal as drivers of speciation.