Historical biogeography, ecology and species richness

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Ecology and historical (phylogeny-based) biogeography have much to offer one another, but exchanges between these fields have been limited. Historical biogeography has become narrowly focused on using phylogenies to discover the history of geological connections among regions. Conversely, ecologists often ignore historical biogeography, even when its input can be crucial. Both historical biogeographers and ecologists have more-or-less abandoned attempts to understand the processes that determine the large-scale distribution of clades. Here, we describe the chasm that has developed between ecology and historical biogeography, some of the important questions that have fallen into it and how it might be bridged. To illustrate the benefits of an integrated approach, we expand on a model that can help explain the latitudinal gradient of species richness.

Section snippets

The current separation of historical biogeography and ecology

Although ecology, phylogeny and biogeography were once blended rather seamlessly by naturalists and pre-cladistic taxonomists, a major chasm now separates these research areas. For the past three decades, historical (phylogenetic) biogeography has been concerned primarily with deriving cladograms for areas based on the phylogenies of the organisms inhabiting these areas 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Although useful tools have been developed, some important components have been ignored. One of these is

Integrative historical biogeography

What determines the large-scale distribution of organisms? At the smallest spatial scales, few would disagree that the distribution of organisms within a region is determined by their ecology (or ecophysiology). But larger scale patterns are the outcome of processes occurring at smaller spatial scales, so large-scale patterns must also connect to ecology. What are the specific ecological processes that determine large-scale patterns of historical biogeography? We briefly outline several that

Integrative historical biogeography and the latitudinal gradient in species richness

The benefits of integrating historical biogeography and ecology can be illustrated by the study of large-scale patterns of species richness. The typical ecological approach focuses on correlations between local or regional-scale richness for a given group or groups of organisms and environmental conditions across several locations (see 28, 29, 30 for recent examples and reviews). But correlation is not causation and environmental variables cannot by themselves increase or decrease local or

Conclusions and prospects

We have attempted to characterize the current gulf between ecology and historical biogeography and the mutual benefits of greater integration between these fields. We see a need for a new research program to explain large-scale biogeographical patterns in a combined ecological and phylogenetic framework. This endeavor will require close collaboration between phylogeneticists and ecologists, and the development of new theory and statistical tools. We look forward to the translation of verbal

Acknowledgements

We thank D. Ackerly, R. Geeta, C. Graham, T. Engstrom, B. Moore, R. Ricklefs, P. Stephens and an anonymous reviewer for helpful criticism of the article. J.J.W.'s research on species richness is supported by US National Science Foundation grant DEB 0331747; M.J.D.'s work in this area is supported by US NSF DEB-0212873.

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