BIOGEOG

• Biogeography is the study of the spatial patterns of biological diversity and its causes, both in the present and in the past
• Biogeographers synthesize information from fields like ecology, evolution, paleontology, geology, climatology, and pedology.
• Goals of biogeography:

  • Develop natural laws and concepts explaining biogeographic processes
  • Provide baseline information on the spatial and temporal distribution of organisms for conservation and management of Earth’s biotic resources
• Central questions of biogeography:

  • What organisms are found where?
  • How are these organisms adapted to the local environment?
  • How have their distributions changed through time?
• Biogeography can be traced back to Aristotle in the 3rd Century B.C., who suggested a dynamic earth to explain variation in life over space and time
• Early biogeographers collected information about the diversity and distribution of living things, leading to the need for a classification scheme
• Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, developed a system for classifying life with binomial nomenclature and pondered how species became adapted to different environments
• Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, hypothesized that life originated in northwestern Europe and migrated, leading to Buffon's Law stating that environmentally similar but isolated regions have distinct assemblages of mammals and birds
• Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain James Cook on a voyage, collected ~3600 plant specimens and affirmed Buffon's Law
• Johann Reinhold Forster circumnavigated the globe with Cook, first to develop systemic description of the world's biotic regions and extending Buffon's Law to plants
• Karl Ludwig Willdenow, a German botanist, described floristic provinces of Europe and suggested multiple sites of origin for life after the Great Flood
• Alexander von Humboldt (Father of Phytogeography) a student of Willdenow, proposed that the current geographical distribution of living organisms depends on both ecological and historical parameters
• Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1820 contributed to the understanding of biogeography in the 19th century
• Adolphe Brongniart (1801-1876) was a paleobotanist of the 19th Century who used the fossil record to draw inferences regarding ancient climates
• Brongniart found tropical fossils in temperate areas and concluded that the earth’s surface had been altered by the uplift and erosion of mountains
• Charles Lyell (1797-1875), regarded as the father of geology, developed the theory of uniformitarianism, stating that the processes we see operating today on the earth’s surface have always done so. Wrote Principles of Geology.
• Charles Darwin, influenced by his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, had a significant impact on biogeography and biology in general
• Darwin explained the spread and isolation of taxa as the result of long-distance dispersal, challenging the "steady state" ideas in biogeography
• Joseph Dalton Hooker, a leader in the extensionist camp, proposed the hypothesis that all members of a once more continuous flora spread over a larger tract of land, which has been broken up by geological and climatic causes
• Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), considered the father of zoogeography, wrote significant books like "The Malay Archipelago" and identified Wallace's Line, a distinct break in faunal compositions between Bali and Lombok
• In the 19th Century, biogeographers contributed generalized rules like Bergmann's rule, Allen's rule, and Cope's rule regarding animal distributions
• Ronald Good (1896-1992) identified six floristic kingdoms and 37 floristic provinces, providing a basis for the biogeographic regions recognized today
• Armen Takhtajan (1910-2009) proposed the Paleotropical Kingdom and subdivided it into 5 floristic subkingdoms and about 13 floristic regions
• Four major developments revolutionized biogeography in the latter part of the 20th Century: acceptance of plate tectonics, new phylogenetic techniques, new ways of conducting ecological research, and investigations in factors limiting distributions
• Sclater, an ornithologist, describe 1000 species of birds. He proposed that the earth was divides into biogeographic regions.