Aim The Mediterranean Basin is a major hotspot of plant biodiversity, including forest trees. Over the past centuries, forests have been fragmented and over-exploited, to which threats climate change are now added. Our aim better understand patterns processes tree biodiversity in provide indicators complementing traditional approaches conservation based on species counts occurrences, using geor...

Phylogenetic reconstruction using the mitochondrial 16S marker shows the presence of a cryptic species of Cacosternum (Anura: Pyxicephalidae) from the eastern Great Escarpment of South Africa, supporting the Greater Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany region of vertebrate endemism. Bioacoustic and morphological characteristics, in conjunction with colouration differences, allow the description of this ...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Part I. Macroevolutionary Models 1 Chapter 1. Diversity, endemism, and age distributions in macroevolutionary sources and sinks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Chapter 2. Origination, extinction and dispersal: integrative models for understandi...

The essential oil obtained from the aerial parts of the Turkish endemism Stachys aleurites (Lamiaceae) has been studied. The main constituents were sesquiterpene hydrocarbons: bcaryophyllene (33.7%), bicyclogermacrene (14.5%) and germacrene D (9.6%). The main monoterpene was a-pinene (8.4%). Some chemotaxonomical considerations have been provided. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

An important aspect of conservation is to understand the founding elements and characteristics of metacommunities in natural environments, and the consequences of anthropogenic disturbance on these patterns. In natural Amazonian environments, the interfluves of the major rivers play an important role in the formation of areas of endemism through the historical isolation of species and the speci...

To advance our limited knowledge of global mosquito biogeography, we analyzed country occurrence records from the Systematic Catalog of the Culicidae (http://www.mosquitocatalog. org/main.asp), and we present world maps of species richness and endemism. A latitudinal biodiversity gradient was observed, with species richness increasing toward the equator. A linear log-log species (y)-area (x) re...

Knowledge of the geographic distribution of plants is essential to underpin the understanding of global biodiversity patterns. Vascular epiphytes are important components of diversity and functionality of Neotropical forests but, unlike their terrestrial counterparts, they are under-represented in large-scale diversity and biogeographic analyses. This is the case for the Atlantic Forest - one o...

Identifying areas of high biodiversity is an established way to prioritize areas for conservation [1-3], but global approaches have been criticized for failing to render global biodiversity value at a scale suitable for local management [4-6]. We assembled 3.1 million species distribution records for 40,401 vascular plant species of tropical Africa from sources including plot data, herbarium da...