Historical Biogeography: Evolution in Time and Space

Abstract

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 past climate and geography, the organism fossil record, or its ecological tolerance. This has revolutionized the discipline, allowing it to escape the dispersal versus vicariance dilemma and to address a wider range of evolutionary questions, including the role of ecological and historical factors in the construction of biomes or the existence of contrasting patterns of range evolution in animals and plants.

Paleobiogeography of an Iberian endemic species,Luciobarbus sclateri(Günther, 1868) (Actinopterygii, Cyprinidae), inferred from mitochondrial and nuclear markers

“…To reconstruct the biogeographical history of L. sclateri populations, we used a parametric approach, due to its ability to integrate the estimates of the evolutionary divergence between lineages into the biogeographical inference (Sanmartín, ). We used the geological units corresponding to the Iberian basins as operational biogeographical units (OBUs) under study (Doadrio, ).…”

Biogeography of Amazonian fishes: deconstructing river basins as biogeographic units

“…Finally, and most importantly, it is necessary to challenge the idea that hydrographic basins are historically stagnant and actual instantaneous images of divergent histories. Thanks to events of biotic dispersal, areas rarely evolve in divergent fashion like taxa (Upchurch, Hunn, 2002;Brooks, 2005;Riddle, Hafner, 2006;Morrone, 2009;Sanmartín, 2012;Matamoros et al, 2015). There are no convincing arguments that the history of earth can be entirely represented as diverging branching diagrams (Hovenkamp, 1997) and the same can be true for the Amazonian basins and its fishes.…”

Jurassic primates, immobile ducks and other oddities: a reply to Heads’ review of The Monkey’s Voyage

“…Likewise, Crisp et al (2011) viewed timetrees as a key aspect of a more hypothesis-driven, as opposed to narrative, historical biogeography, and Sanmartín (2012) described the critical role of such information in the elaboration of parametric biogeographic methods (also see Ree and Smith 2008;Ronquist and Sanmartín 2011). A general outcome of this integration of timetree evidence, also widely recognised as a crucial development, is the validation of LDD as a frequent cause of disjunctions, including many cases that had previously been attributed to vicariance (de Queiroz 2005;McGlone 2005;Gibbs 2006;Sanmartín 2012;Wen et al 2013).…”