Model selection in ecology and evolution

Recently, researchers in several areas of ecology and evolution have begun to change the way in which they analyze data and make biological inferences. Rather than the traditional null hypothesis testing approach, they have adopted an approach called model selection, in which several competing hypotheses are simul-taneously confronted with data. Model selection can be used to identify a single best model, thus lending sup-port to one particular hypothesis, or it can be used to make inferences based on weighted support from a complete set of competing models. Model selection is widely accepted and well developed in certain fields, most notably in molecular systematics and mark– recapture analysis. However, it is now gaining support in several other areas, from molecular evolution to land