Biogeography is the study of the distribution of
biodiversity over
space and
time. It aims to reveal where organisms live, at what abundance, and why.
[1]
The patterns of species distribution at this level can usually be explained through a combination of historical factors such as
speciation,
extinction,
continental drift,
glaciation (and associated variations in
sea level, river routes, and so on), and
river capture, in combination with the area and isolation of landmasses (geographic constraints) and available energy supplies.
History
The theory of biogeography grows out of the work of
Alfred Russel Wallace and other early evolutionary scientists. Wallace studied the distribution of flora and fauna in the Malay Archipelago in the
19th century. With the exception of Wallace and a few others, prior to the publication of
The Theory of Island Biogeography by
Robert MacArthur and
E.O. Wilson in
1967 (which expanded their
1963 paper on the same topic) the field of biogeography was seen as a primarily historical one, and as such the field was seen as a purely descriptive one.
MacArthur and Wilson changed this perception, and showed that the species richness of an area could be predicted in terms of such factors as habitat area, immigration rate and extinction rate. This gave rise to an interest in
island biogeography. The application of island biogeography theory to
habitat fragments spurred the development of the fields of
conservation biology and
landscape ecology (at least among British and American academics; landscape ecology has a distinct genesis among European academics).
Classic biogeography has been expanded by the development of
molecular systematics, creating a new discipline known as
phylogeography. This development allowed scientists to test theories about the origin and dispersal of populations, such as
island endemics. For example, while classic biogeographers were able to speculate about the origins of species in the
Hawaiian Islands, phylogeography allows them to test theories of relatedness between these populations and putative source populations in
Asia and
North America.
Paleobiogeography goes one step further to include
paleogeographic data and considerations of
plate tectonics. Using molecular analyses and corroborated by
fossils, it has been possible to demonstrate that
perching birds evolved first in the region of
Australia or the adjacent
Antarctic (which at that time lay somewhat further north and had a temperate climate). From there, they spread to the other
Gondwanan continents and Southeast Asia - the part of
Laurasia then closest to their origin of dispersal - in the late
Paleogene, before achieving a global distribution in the early
Neogene (Jønsson & Fjeldså 2006). Not knowing the fact that at the time of dispersal, the Indian Ocean was much narrower than it is today, and that South America was closer to the Antarctic, one would be hard pressed to explain the presence of many "ancient" lineages of perching birds in Africa, as well as the mainly South American distribution of the
suboscines.
National Biogeography Awareness Week, which started in 1982, is October 14th - 21st.
Classification
Biogeography is a synthetic science, related to
geography,
biology,
soil science,
geology,
climatology,
ecology and
evolution.
Some fundamentals in biogeography are
- evolution (change in genetic composition of a population)
- extinction (disappearance of a species)
- dispersal (movement of populations away from their point of origin, related to migration)
- range and distribution
- endemic areas
- vicariance
See also
References
- Jønsson, Knud A. & Fjeldså, Jon (2006): Determining biogeographical patterns of dispersal and diversification in oscine passerine birds in Australia, Southeast Asia and Africa. J. Biogeogr. 33(7): 1155–1165. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2006.01507.x (HTML abstract)
- Dansereau, Pierre (1957): Biogeography: An Ecological Perspective. Ronald Press Company, New York City, ISBN 0826023304.
External links
Major journals
Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome or for the entire Earth. Biodiversity is often used as a measure of the health of biological systems.
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The term
SPACE (capitalized) can refer to:
- , a Canadian science-fiction channel
- The Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment
- DSPACE, a term in computational complexity theory
..... Click the link for more information. time.
One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and time itself is something that can be measured.
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Speciation is the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise. There are four modes of natural speciation, based on the extent to which speciating populations are geographically isolated from one another:
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extinction is the cessation of existence of a species or group of taxa, reducing biodiversity. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of that species (although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point).
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Continental drift refers to the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other.
Frank Bursley Taylor had proposed the concept in a Geological Society of America meeting in 1908 and published his work in the GSA Bulletin in June 1910.
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glacier is a large, slow moving river of ice, formed from compacted layers of snow, that slowly deforms and flows in response to gravity. Glacier ice is the largest reservoir of fresh water on Earth, and second only to oceans as the largest reservoir of total water.
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This article or section relies largely or entirely upon a .
Please help [ improve this article] by introducing appropriate of additional sources. ()
This article has been tagged since December 2006.
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River capture, in geology, is an event in which one river or stream captures or intercepts part of another. River captures are natural rather than man-made events. A variety of mechanisms can cause river capture, but the two most common causes are:-
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Alfred Russel Wallace
Born 8 January 1823(1823--)
Usk, Monmouthshire, Wales
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For the periodical, see .
The
19th Century (also written XIX century) lasted from 1801 through 1900 in the Gregorian calendar. It is often referred to as the "1800s.
..... Click the link for more information. The study of island biogeography is a field within biogeography that attempts to establish and explain the factors that affect the species diversity of a particular community.
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Robert Helmer MacArthur (April 7, 1930 – November 1, 1972) was an American ecologist who made a major impact on many areas of community and population ecology.
MacArthur received a Master's degree in mathematics from Brown University (1953). A student of G.
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Edward Osborne Wilson (born June 10, 1929) is an American biologist (Myrmecology, a branch of entomology), researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), and naturalist (conservationism).
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1930s 1940s 1950s - 1960s - 1970s 1980s 1990s
1964 1965 1966 - 1967 - 1968 1969 1970
Year 1967 (MCMLXVII
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1930s 1940s 1950s - 1960s - 1970s 1980s 1990s
1960 1961 1962 - 1963 - 1964 1965 1966
Year 1963 (MCMLXIII
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The study of island biogeography is a field within biogeography that attempts to establish and explain the factors that affect the species diversity of a particular community.
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Habitat fragmentation is a process of environmental change important in evolution and conservation biology. As the name implies, it describes the emergence of discontinuities (fragmentation) in an organism's preferred environment (habitat).
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Conservation biology, or conservation ecology, is the science of analyzing and protecting Earth's biological diversity. Conservation biology draws from the biological, physical and social sciences, economics, and the practice of natural-resource management.
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Landscape ecology is a sub-discipline of ecology and geography that address how spatial variation in the landscape affects ecological processes such as the distribution and flow of energy, materials and individuals in the environment (which, in turn, may influence the distribution
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Molecular phylogeny is the use of the structure of molecules to gain information on an organism's evolutionary relationships. The result of a molecular phylogenetic analysis is expressed in a so-called phylogenetic tree.
Every living organism contains DNA, RNA, and proteins.
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Phylogeography is the study of the processes controlling the geographic distributions of lineages by constructing the genealogies of populations and genes.[1] This term was introduced to describe geographically structured genetic signals within and among species.
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endemic, it is unique to its own place or region; it is found only there, and not found naturally anywhere else. The place must be a discrete geographical unit, often an island or island group, but sometimes a country, habitat type, or other defined area or zone.
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Hawaiian Islands, once known as the Sandwich Islands, form an archipelago of nineteen islands and atolls, numerous smaller islets, and undersea seamounts trending northwest by southeast in the North Pacific Ocean between latitudes 19° N and 29° N.
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Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent. It covers 8.6% of the Earth's total surface area (or 29.4% of its land area) and, with almost 4 billion people, it contains more than 60% of the world's current human population.
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North America is a continent
[1] in the Earth's northern hemisphere and (chiefly) western hemisphere. It is bordered on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the southeast by the Caribbean Sea, and on the south and west
..... Click the link for more information. Palaeogeography (sometimes spelled paleogeography) is the study of the ancient geologic environments of the Earth's surface as preserved in the stratigraphic record.
Paleogeographic analysis is used in the detailed study of sedimentary basins in petroleum geology.
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Plate tectonics (from Greek τέκτων, tektōn "builder" or "mason") is a theory of geology that has been developed to explain the observed evidence for large scale motions of the Earth's lithosphere.
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- For other uses of the term, see Fossil (disambiguation)
FOSSIL is a standard for allowing serial communication for telecommunications programs under the DOS operating system.
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Suborders
- Acanthisitti
- Tyranni
- Passeri
A
passerine is a bird of the giant order
Passeriformes. More than half of all species of bird are passerines.
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