Areas of endemism in Argentina: an analysis using 820 species of plants, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and insects

SZUMIK, C., L. AAGESEN, V. ARZAMENDIA, D. BALDO, D. CASAGRANDA, F. CUEZZO, J. M. DÍAZ GÓMEZ, A. DI GIÁCOMO, N. GIANNINI, A. GIRAUDO, P. GOLOBOFF, C. GRAMAJO, C. KOPUCHIAN, S. KRETZSCHMAR, M. LIZARRALDE, A. MOLINA ET AL. ZULOAGA, F. O.

TUCUMAN, ARGENTINA

Workshop; XXVII International Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society; 2008

The generalized notion of endemism implies distributional concordance of different groups of living taxa. The main goal of this work is to analyze in a surface of 1.000.000 km2 whether it is possible to find areas of endemism supported by species of groups as diverse as the groups included in our data set.  Then, the distribution of 820 species of plants (xx families), mammals (xx families), reptiles (xx families), amphibians (xx families), birds (xx families) and insects (xx families) is analyzed using an optimality criterion to identify areas of endemism, implemented in the program NDM/VNDM (www.zmuc.dk/public/phylogeny/Endemism).  This is the largest such study ever done in South America, and required the collaboration of numerous specialists.  Unlike many other distributional studies, the present dataset contains only records provided by specialists in the respective groups. Almost all of these records are connected to a specimen in one of the major collections of Argentina, many of them collected by the authors. This implies that the ID and taxonomy are reliable (and subject to scrutiny), which is not the case for records downloaded from data bases in the www.