Areas of Endemism: Methodological and Applied Biogeographic Contributions from South America

CASAGRANDA M. DOLORES; MERCEDES LIZARRALDE

Current Progress in Biological Research

InTech

Año: 2013; p. 3 - 18

The geographic distribution of organisms is the subject of Biogeography, a field of biology that naturalists have carried out for over two centuries. From the observation of animal and plant distribution, diverse questions emerge; the description of diversity gradients; delimitation of areas of endemism; identification of ancestral areas and search of relationships among areas, among others, have become major issues to be analyzed, worked out and solved. In this way, biogeography has turned into a multi-layered discipline with both theoretical and analytical frameworks and far-reaching objectives.