title: RASP (Reconstruct Ancestral State in Phylogenies): a tool for historical biogeography.
abstract: We announce the release of Reconstruct Ancestral State in Phylogenies (RASP), a user-friendly software package for inferring historical biogeography through reconstructing ancestral geographic distributions on phylogenetic trees. RASP utilizes the widely used Statistical-Dispersal Vicariance Analysis (S-DIVA), the Dispersal-Extinction-Cladogenesis (DEC) model (Lagrange), a Statistical DEC model (S-DEC) and BayArea. It provides a graphical user interface (GUI) to specify a phylogenetic tree or set of trees and geographic distribution constraints, draws pie charts on the nodes of a phylogenetic tree to indicate levels of uncertainty, and generates high-quality exportable graphical results. RASP can run on both Windows and Mac OS X platforms. All documentation and source code for RASP is freely available at http://mnh.scu.edu.cn/soft/blog/RASP.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Bio-Resources and Eco-Environment of Ministry of Education, College of Life Sciences, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan 610065, PR China; Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, BioSci 130 Science Drive, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Department of Botany, Oklahoma State University, 301 Physical Science, Stillwater, OK 74078-3013, USA. Electronic address: aj.harris@okstate.edu.
authors.forename: Alan J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Harris
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, BioSci 130 Science Drive, Durham, NC 27708, USA; Department of Biological Sciences, New York City College of Technology, The City University of New York, 300 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA.
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Blair
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Bio-Resources and Eco-Environment of Ministry of Education, College of Life Sciences, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan 610065, PR China. Electronic address: xjhe@scu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Xingjin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: He
mesh_terms: D003196:Computer Graphics; D049810:Genetic Speciation; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010802:Phylogeny; D058974:Phylogeography; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D012984:Software; D035501:Uncertainty; D014584:User-Computer Interface
keywords: Ancestral state reconstruction; Historical biogeography; Software