IN SEARCH OF A METHOD FOR CLADISTIC BIOGEOGRAPHY - AN EMPIRICAL-COMPARISON OF COMPONENT ANALYSIS, BROOKS PARSIMONY ANALYSIS, AND 3 AREA STATEMENTS

Three quantitative cladistic biogeographic methods, namely, component analysis, Brooks parsimony analysis (BPA), and three-area statements ( TAS) have been proposed for obtaining general area cladograms from tax on-area cladograms. Available programs implementing these methods incl ude COMPONENT versions 1.5 and 2.0 for component analysis, TAS for thr ee-area statements, and Hennig86 for analysing matrices for both three -area statements and BPA. Ten different data sets were analysed with t hese programs and items of error were used to evaluate the general are a cladograms obtained. None of the computer implementations of the met hods compared proved to be more effective than the others.