The theory of convergence predicts that, given similar selective regimes, both present and past, unrelated ecological communities will show similar attributes. Mild Pleistocene climate, highly infertile soils, and similar fire regimes explain the remarkable convergence between mediterranean-type vegetation from South Africa (fynbos) and Australia (kwongan). Heathlands in the Aljibe Mountains, a...

Previous research focusing on broad-scale or geographically invariant species-environment dependencies suggest that temperature-related variables explain more of the variation in reptile distributions than precipitation. However, species-environment relationships may exhibit considerable spatial variation contingent upon the geographic nuances that vary between locations. Broad-scale, geographi...

A formal method was developed to determine areas of endemism. The study region is divided into cells, and the number of species that can be considered as endemic is counted for a given set of cells (= area). Thus, the areas with the maximum number of species considered endemic are preferred. This is the first method for the identification of areas of endemism that implements an optimality crite...

One of the key observations about the distribution of life on Earth is that it is non-random in space and time. Description of these spatio-temporal patterns represents the data of biogeography, and explanation of these spatio-temporal patterns has driven the development of the science of biogeography. Perhaps the concept most associated with the description of distributions is endemism, which ...

Island biogeography has greatly contributed to our understanding of the processes determining species' distributions. Previous research has focused on the effects of island geography (i.e., island area, elevation, and isolation) and current climate as drivers of island species richness and endemism. Here, we evaluate the potential additional effects of historical climate on breeding land bird r...

Endemism and species richness are highly relevant to the global prioritization of conservation efforts in which oceanic islands have remained relatively neglected. When compared to mainland areas, oceanic islands in general are known for their high percentage of endemic species but only moderate levels of species richness, prompting the question of their relative conservation value. Here we qua...

This paper explores the distributional data of 4,224 Tipulidae (Insecta: Diptera) species to search for endemism patterns in a worldwide scale and to test the extent to which the global patterns of endemism of the group fit into previously proposed regionalization schemes, particularly Wallace's system and recent revisions of it. Large scale areas of endemism are assessed using the grid-based m...

Davison et al. (Reports, 28 August 2015, p. 970) claim that virtual taxa of Glomeromycota show little endemism and that endemism that exists is similar to the levels seen in plant families. We show that this is likely due to the conservative species definition rather than to any ecological pattern.