Spatial methodologies in historical biogeography of islands

POSADAS, PAULA; CRISCI, JORGE V.; KATINAS, LILIANA

The Biology of Island Floras

Cambridge University Press

Año: 2011; p. 37 - 56

The emergence of phylogenetic and molecular systematics over the past years has been profusely employed to infer evolutionary and biogeographic hypotheses on islands. There are, however, historical biogeographic approaches that are also important tools for providing testable hypotheses to explain the spatial arrangement of island organisms. Some of these approaches are for example: (1) parsimony analysis of endemicity (PAE), an approach that helps to make clear the patterns of organism distributions using biota similarity; and (2) panbiogeography track compatibility analysis, where individual tracks of organisms are treated as biogeographic hypotheses of locality or distribution area relationships. The aforementioned approaches could be referred as ?spatial methodologies? since both of them emphasize the spatial component of biodiversity. The objectives of this chapter are: 1) to briefly describe these two historical biogeographic approaches; and 2) to present examples of their application on insular systems of southern South America, including habitat and continental and oceanic island systems.