Synnovation and confluence explain disparities in species richness across the Andes and Hengduan-Himalaya Mountains

We are grateful to Mr. Julian Harber (UK) for his continued guidance and support of our studies on Berberis. We thank the curators and staff of the Field Museum of Natural History (USA), Missouri Botanical Garden (USA), Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (UK), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK), California Botanic Garden (USA), the Herbarium of the Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB, China), and the Herbarium of the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences (PE, China) for their assistance with specimen examination, taxonomic verification, and tissue sampling. We thank the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species at the Kunming Institute of Botany (China) for facilitating DNA extraction and sequencing from herbarium and historic collections. We thank Mr. Hongxi Zhang for assistance with field sampling and Mr. Ke (Jungle) Liang for assistance with leaf trait measurements. We thank Drs. Kuo-Fang Chung, Kyle Tomlinson, and Sheng-Feng Shen for their long-term support and encouragement throughout this project, and Drs. Qiuyue Zhang, Linbo Jia, Jian Huang, and Wenna Ding for their constructive comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Computational analyses were supported by the Grainger Bioinformatics Center at the Field Museum of Natural History through the provision of bioinformatic infrastructure and computing resources.

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (National Science Foundation of China to Y.-W. Xing)–32225005; The 14th Five-Year Plan of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences (XTBG-1450101 and XTBG-1450102 to Y.-W. Xing), Yunnan Revitalization Talent Support Program-Yunling Scholar Project (XDYC-YLXZ-2023-0029 to Y.-W. Xing), the Young and Middle-aged Academic and Technical Leaders of Yunnan (No. 202305AC160051 to S.-F. Li) and the Yunnan Fundamental Research Projects (202501BC070013 to Y.-W. Xing).

1. These authors jointly supervised this work: Richard H. Ree, Yao-Wu, Xing.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Applied Research Center for Tropical Plant Conservation, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mengla, Yunnan, China

   Chih-Chieh Yu, Zhi-Qiang Du, Shu-Feng Li & Yao-Wu Xing

2. Department of Collections, Conservation, and Research, Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois, USA

   Chih-Chieh Yu & Richard H. Ree

3. Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

   Renske E. Onstein

4. Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL), Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

   Renske E. Onstein

5. State Key Laboratory of Plant Diversity and Specialty Crops, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mengla, Yunnan, China

   Shu-Feng Li & Yao-Wu Xing

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to
Richard H. Ree or Yao-Wu Xing.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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