Welcome to geodendron!

Now that this blog has been up for several weeks, it's probably time to post something. It's become increasingly apparent (at least in my opinion) that the time is ripe for some serious testing of phylo- and biogeographic methods. Hopefully this blog will serve as a forum for thoughts and developments related to (i) approaches to simulating appropriate benchmark datasets, (ii) simulation studies to test existing methods, and (iii) the development of new analytical tools.

I envision a few posts each week on published papers or unpublished thoughts, each of which will spark comments and discourse on the post's topic. Not that this should need to be pointed out, but just in case: all discussions on this blog should remain civil and respectful in tone.

Jeet and I realized the potential usefulness of this blog when we discovered that we were duplicating each other's efforts in writing generalized simulation programs for phylogeographic data. Roughly, both of our programs relax coalescent assumptions (among other things) and allow individuals to move on a continuous landscape. My collaborators and I are in the process of writing up an application note about our program and are trying to figure out what simple simulations would be good for illustrating the utility of continuous-landscape simulations over existing coalescent-based simulations.

So, to kick things off, what are your thoughts on this? What are some simple scenarios where relaxing the coalescent assumption might be particularly important?