Matrix representation of trees, redundancy, and weighting

Phylogenetic systematics has advanced to the stage that, at least for some groups of organisms, there are now several inde? pendent analyses of relationships among the same taxa. How should these separate estimates be combined into a single tree? One possibility is to join the data sets into a large matrix that is subjected to a suitable method of phylogenetic inference (total evidence sensu Kluge, 1989). How? ever, this approach is difficult when the original data matrices are many and large, and it is impossible when the data are in different format, e.g., a mixture of distance data and discrete characters. Consensus