Ecography
Understanding oscine passerine dispersal patterns out of their Australian area of origin is hampered by a paucity of robust phylogenies. We constructed a molecular phylogeny of the oscine family, Oriolidae, which is distributed from Australia through to the Old World. We used the phylogeny to assess direction and timing of dispersal and whether dispersal can be linked with the well‐documented movements...
Understanding how historical processes have either similarly, or differentially, shaped the evolution of lineages or biotic assemblages is important for a broad spectrum of fields. Gaining such understanding can be particularly challenging, however, especially for regions that have a complex geologic and biological history. In this study we apply a broad comparative approach to distill such regional...
We compared the effect of general circulation models and greenhouse gas emission scenarios on the uncertainty associated with models predicting changes in areas favourable to animal species. Given that mountain species are particularly at risk due to climate warming, we selected one amphibian (Baetic midwife toad), one reptile (Lataste's viper), one bird (Bonelli's eagle), and one mammal (Iberian...
The species–area relationship (SAR) is one of the most fundamental tools in ecology. After almost a century of quantitative ecology, however, the quest for a “best SAR model” still remains elusive, with a substantial uncertainty about the best fitting SAR model frequently being observed. Recent research has required that this uncertainty be addressed, and a multimodel SAR framework has been devised...
Isolation by distance (IBD) has been a common measure of genetic structure among populations and is based on Euclidean distances among populations. Whereas IBD does not incorporate geographic complexity (e.g. dispersal barriers, corridors) that may better predict genetic structure, a new approach (landscape genetics) joins landscape ecology with population genetics to better model genetic structure...
The “Great American Biotic Interchange” (GABI) is regarded as a defining event in the biogeography of the Americas. It is hypothesized to have occurred when the Isthmus of Panama closed ca three million years ago (Ma), ending the isolation of South America and permitting the mixing of its biota with that of North America. This view of the GABI is based largely upon the animal fossil record, but recent...
The southern European peninsulas (Iberian, Italian and Balkan) are traditionally recognized as glacial refugia from where many species colonized central and northern Europe after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). However, evidence that some species had more northerly refugia is accumulating from phylogeographic, palaeontological and palynological studies, and more recently from species distribution...
Most of the Earth's biodiversity resides in the tropics. However, a comprehensive understanding of which factors control range limits of tropical species is still lacking. Climate is often thought to be the predominant range‐determining mechanism at large spatial scales. Alternatively, species’ ranges may be controlled by soil or other environmental factors, or by non‐environmental factors such as...
Terrestrial vertebrates show striking changes in species richness across topographic gradients. For mammals, nearly twice as many species per unit area occur in topographically complex regions as in adjacent lowlands. The geological context of this pervasive biogeographic pattern suggests that tectonic processes have a first‐order impact on regional diversity.
I evaluate ecological, evolutionary,...
The geographic range of a species is influenced by past phylogenetic and biogeographic patterns. However, other historical interactions, including the interplay between life history and geography, are also likely involved. Therefore, the range size of a species can be explained on the basis of niche‐breadth or dispersal related hypotheses, and previous work on European butterflies suggests that both,...
Habitat destruction is the leading cause of species extinctions. However, there is typically a time‐lag between the reduction in habitat area and the eventual disappearance of the remnant populations. These “surviving but ultimately doomed” species represent an extinction debt. Calculating the magnitude of such future extinction events has been hampered by potentially inaccurate assumptions about...
Separated throughout most of the Cenozoic era, North and South America were joined during the mid‐Pliocene when the uplift of Panama formed a land bridge between these two continents. The fossil record indicates that this connection allowed an unprecedented degree of inter‐continental exchange to occur between unique, previously isolated biotic assemblages, a phenomenon now recognized as the “Great...
Transition zones, located at the boundaries between biogeographic regions, represent events of biotic hybridization, promoted by historical and ecological changes. They deserve special attention, because they represent areas of intense biotic interaction. In its more general sense, the Mexican Transition Zone is a complex and varied area where Neotropical and Nearctic biotas overlap, from southwestern...
Species distributions are a product of contemporary and historical forces. Using phylogenetic and geographic data, we explore the timing of and barriers to the diversification of the Andean butterfly genus Lymanopoda (Nymphalidae, Satyrinae). Clade and species level diversification is coincident with Andean orogeny and Pleistocene glaciation cycles. Lymanopoda has primarily diversified within elevational...
Starting in the late 1970s, ecologists began unraveling the role of recently extinct large vertebrates in evolutionary ecology and ecosystem dynamics. Three decades later, practitioners are now considering the role of ecological history in conservation practice, and some have called for restoring missing ecological functions and evolutionary potential using taxon substitutes – extant, functionally...
Pteridophytes (ferns and fern‐allies) represent the second‐largest group of vascular plants, but their global biogeography remains poorly studied. Given their functional biology, pteridophytes are expected to show a more pronounced relation to water availability and a higher dispersal ability compared to seed plants. We test these assertions and document the global pattern of pteridophyte richness...