ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses supertree methods , methods that assemble a collection of either rooted or unrooted input trees into one or more trees, called supertrees [34]. The strength of supertrees is that they can make statements about branching information that are not contained in a single input tree, but derive from the cumulative branching information of several input trees. Figure 20.1 depicts an example. Typically supertrees are used to describe complex phylogenetic relationships that allow evolutionary biologists to study their implications on the tree of all species — the Tree of Life. Thus, ideally, input trees are species trees , that describe evolutionary relationships of species. An overview and discussions about the biological relevance of supertree methods can be found in [61, 73, 10, 57, 23, 30, 9].
