Are Cenozoic relict species also climatic relicts? Insights from the macroecological evolution of the giant sedges of Carex sect. Rhynchocystis

The occurrences of the extant species were collected from GBIF, revised and complemented with bibliographic references and herbarium specimens. Because of the large number of occurrences obtained for mainland C. pendula, we randomly reduced the number of data points, retaining only those that were not duplicated using an accuracy of two decimal points. The final dataset for the studied extant groups was composed of 4,859 occurrences for mainland C. pendula and 69 for C. agastachys. Macaronesian species were represented by 558 localities, 553 for C. leviosa from the Azores archipelago, and only five for C. sequeirae from Madeira including all the known existing populations (more details in Miguez et al., 2021). The fossil ancestor dataset was composed of six Pliocene records identified as Carex plicata.