Where is historical biogeography going? The evolution of the discipline in the first decade of the 21st century

POSADAS, P.; GROSSI, M.A:; ORTIZ JAUREGUIZAR, E.

PROGRESS IN PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD

Lugar: London; Año: 2013 vol. 37 p. 377 - 396

0309-1333

Historical biogeography studies how those processes that occur over long periods of time influence distributional patterns of life forms. It has been argued that historical biogeography is in the midst of a scientific revolution. The aim of this paper is to analyze the evolution of historical biogeography during the first decade of the 21st century and its major trends in the near future. To achieve this objective we constructed a data base containing all articles which dealt with historical biogeography published in the Journal of Biogeography during 1998-2010. The data base included 610 published contributions. Our results indicated that historical biogeography is going through a growth period. The papers analysed were written by 2018 authors, with a mean of 3.3 authors per paper. Authors from 62 countries were involved, and most of them worked in Europe or North America. The Palaearctic was the most analysed region. Most contributions dealt with terrestrial habitats and were devoted to animal (especially Chordata) and plant taxa. Phylogeography was the most used approach (35%), followed by biota similarity and PAE (13%) and molecular biogeography (12%), with cladistic biogeography and event-based methods at 6% each. Some of the future challenges that historical biogeography faces could be summarized as follows: 1) to increase the study of taxa which are underrepresented according to the segment  of biodiversity they represent, 2) to balance the amount of work devoted to different biogeographical regions, 3) to increase biogeographical knowledge of aquatic habitats, 4) to maintain the diversity of approaches, preventing the reduction of time, spatial, and taxonomic scales addressed by the discipline, and 5) to continue integrating historical biogeography along with other sources of information from other disciplines (e.g. ecology, palaeontology, geology, isotope chemistry, remote sensing) into a richer context for explaining, past, present, and future patterns of biodiversity on Earth.