Historiographical approaches to biogeography: a critical review (original) (raw)
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Historical biogeography: A review of its basic concepts and critical issues
Journal of Arid Environments, 2006
Biogeography (the study of the geographical distribution of organisms) ranges from descriptive to interpretative studies. Interpretative biogeography developed two research traditions named historical and ecological biogeography, respectively. The main difference between these research traditions is the time-scale one. The objective of this paper is to summarize the current state of historical biogeography.
Historical Biogeography: Evolution in Time and Space
Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2012
Biogeography is the discipline of biology that studies the present and past distribution patterns of biological diversity and their underlying environmental and historical causes. For most of its history, biogeography has been divided into proponents of vicariance explanations, who defend that distribution patterns can mainly be explained by geological, tectonic-isolating events; and dispersalists, who argue that current distribution patterns are largely the result of recent migration events. This paper provides an overview of the evolution of the discipline from methods focused on finding general patterns of distribution (cladistic biogeography), to those that integrate biogeographic processes (event-based biogeography), to modern probabilistic approaches (parametric biogeography). The latter allows incorporating into biogeographic inference estimates of the divergence time between lineages (usually based on DNA sequences) and external sources of evidence, such as information on pa...
Historical biogeography: Status and goals for the 21st century
The current state of the debate among dispersalists, panhiogeographers and vicariists is reviewed. Dispersalism has few supporters, possibly because scientific tests of center of origin and dispersal route hypotheses is difficult. Recent panbiogeographic papers basically originate in Latin America, Europe and New Zealand. Vicariance biogeography numerically dominates recent literature. Retrovicariance. non-parametric statistical analysis and reversible parsimony are promising new techniques. Quantitative biogeographic and ecological data should be considered simultaneously and organic evolution should be incorporated to the core of biogeographic analysis. Biogeographic papers are widely scattered and can only be reliably retrieved through indices, particularly Biological Abstracts. Considering population. the European Union, Canada and Chile are the most productive countries.
Progress in Physical Geography, 2013
It has been argued that historical biogeography, the study of how processes that occur over long periods of time influence the distribution of life forms, is in the midst of a scientific revolution. The aim of this paper is to analyze the evolution of historical biogeography during the first decade of the 21st century and to identify major trends for the near future. We constructed a database containing all articles which dealt with historical biogeography published in theJournal of Biogeography during 1998–2010. The database included 610 contributions. Our results indicated that historical biogeography is going through a growth period. The papers analyzed were written by 2018 authors, with a mean of 3.3 authors per paper. Authors from 62 countries were involved, and most of them worked in Europe or North America. The Palearctic was the most analyzed region. Most contributions dealt with terrestrial habitats and were devoted to animal (especially Chordata) and plant taxa. Phylogeography was the most used approach (35%), followed by biota similarity and PAE (13%) and molecular biogeography (12%), with cladistic biogeography and event-based methods at 6% each. Some of the future challenges that historical biogeography faces are summarized: (1) to increase the study of taxa which are underrepresented according to the segment of biodiversity they represent; (2) to balance the amount of work devoted to different biogeographical regions; (3) to increase biogeographical knowledge of aquatic habitats; (4) to maintain the diversity of approaches, preventing the reduction of time, spatial, and taxonomic scales addressed by the discipline; and (5) to continue integrating historical biogeography along with other sources of information from other disciplines (e.g. ecology, paleontology, geology, isotope chemistry, remote sensing) into a richer context for explaining past, present, and future patterns of biodiversity on Earth.
A Vicariance Approach to Historical Biogeography
BioScience, 1980
Historical biogeography is a peculiar discipline because most of its practitioners are not biogeographers per se but systematists specializing on some group of organisms. Systematists know that their task is studying the distribution of characters among various species to discover how the species are interrelated, what groups of them (taxa) exist, and what their origins may be. But what is the task of biogeographers? One could say that biogeographers study the distribution of species among various areas of the world to discover how the areas are interrelated, what groups of them (regions) exist, and what their origins may be. But what are biogeographic regions, and how can they be recognized? In what sense are they "related" to each other, and what is the pattern of their interrelationship? What has caused the pattern?
Bridging historical and ecological approaches in biogeography
2006
The practice of biogeography is rooted in disciplines that traditionally have had little intellectual exchange and yielded two complementary biogeographic approaches: ecological and historical biogeography. The aim of this paper is to review alternative biogeographic approaches in the context of spatial analysis. Biogeography can be used to set priorities for conservation of biological diversity, but also to design strategies to control biological invasions and vectors of human diseases, to provide information about the former distribution of species, and to guide development of ecological restoration initiatives, among other applications. But no one of these applications could be fully carried out until an integrative framework on biogeography, which bridges biogeographical historical and ecological paths of thinking, has been developed. Although we do not propose a new biogeographic method, we highlight the causes and consequences of the lack of a conceptual framework integrating ecology and history in biogeography, and how this required framework would allow biogeography to be fully utilised in fields such as conservation.