Walter Jetz,* Carsten Rahbek and Robert K. Colwell Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA Biology Department, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA *Correspondence and present address a...

The topic of microbial biogeography is almost 100 years old, however, when confronted with questions about the existence and extent of endemism in the microbial world, many microbiologists respond with opinions and theoretical arguments rather than examples of well-conducted studies. We begin this chapter with an overview of this debate as it ·applies to free-living prokaryotes in part because ...

In conservation studies, solely widespread species are often used as indicators of diversity patterns, but narrow-ranged species can show different patterns. Here, we assess how well subsets of narrow-ranged, widespread or randomly selected plant species represent patterns of species richness and weighted endemism in Gabon, tropical Africa. Specifically, we assess the effect of using different ...

BACKGROUND A number of biotic and abiotic factors have been proposed as drivers of geographic variation in species richness. As biotic elements, inter-specific interactions are the most widely recognized. Among abiotic factors, in particular for plants, climate and topographic variables as well as their historical variation have been correlated with species richness and endemism. In this study,...

The present-day distribution of centres of endemism is the result of an interplay between historical biogeography and contemporary environmental conditions. The relative importance of these two factors has never been established, however, for want of information on both the distributions themselves and the continental-scale measurement of environmental variables. Recently published maps of avia...

Previous research has shown that the geographical distribution patterns of freshwater fishes and amphibians have been influenced by past climatic oscillations in China resulting from Pleistocene glacial activity. However, it remains unknown how these past changes have impacted the present-day distribution of Chinese freshwater crabs. This work describes the diversity and endemism of freshwater ...

The Parsimony Analysis of Endemicity (PAE) is a method of historical biogeography that is used for detecting and connecting areas of endemism. Based on data on the distribution of Neotropical primates, we constructed matrices using quadrats, interfluvial regions and pre-determinated areas of endemism described for avians as Operative Geographic Units (OGUs). We codified the absence of a species...

The topic of microbial biogeography is almost 100 years old, however, when confronted with questions about the existence and extent of endemism in the microbial world, many microbiologists respond with opinions and theoretical arguments rather than examples of well-conducted studies. We begin this chapter with an overview of this debate as it ·applies to free-living prokaryotes in part because ...