A continuously mixed series of microbial communities inhabits various points of the respiratory tract, with community composition determined by distance from colonization sources, colonization rates, and extinction rates. Ecology and evolution theory developed in the context of biogeography is relevant to clinical microbiology and could reframe the interpretation of recent studies comparing com...

Biogeography has had an unusually protracted identity crisis (e.g. Brown & Lomolino, 2000; Donoghue & Moore, 2003), although the discipline took on a relatively ‘modern’ look well over a century ago – the thoroughly ‘modern’ observations of Alfred Russel Wallace have been discussed elsewhere (Funk, 2004), and Joseph Dalton Hooker’s views about floristic histories across lands of the southern he...

Biogeography based optimization (BBO) is a type of evolutionary algorithm. It is a population based optimization algorithm and provides clarification about the changing distribution of all species in different environment with time. Biogeography-based Optimization (BBO) is a new intelligent optimization algorithm, which was developed by the simulation of the migration of biological organisms on...

In recent decades, the field of historical biogeography has become increasingly divorced from evolutionary biology, ecology, and studies of species richness. In this paper, we explore the evolutionary causes of patterns of biogeography and species richness in Northern Hemisphere treefrogs, combining phylogenetics, ancestral area reconstruction, molecular dating methods, and ecological niche mod...

The MacArthur-Wilson equilibrium theory of island biogeography has been one of the more influential concepts in modern biogeography and ecology. In this paper, we synthesize the theory and examine effects of different immigration/extinction rate-species diversity curves on original predictions from the theory by using the System Dynamics simulation modeling approach. Moreover, we develop a comp...

The enigmatic placozoans, which hold a key position in the metazoan Tree of Life, have attracted substantial attention in many areas of biological and biomedical research. While placozoans have become an emerging model system, their ecology and particularly biogeography remain widely unknown. In this study, we use modelling approaches to explore habitat preferences, and distribution pattern of ...

Although dispersal limitation is a central feature of most quantitative models of island biogeography (Rosindell and Phillimore 2011, Carvalho et al. 2015, Triantis et al. 2015, Valente et al. 2015), these models generally do not incorporate variability in dispersal abilities among species in the community (but see Sukumaran et al. 2016). Furthermore, statistical approaches to island biogeograp...

Little is known about the relative importance of spatial and environmental factors to structuring aquatic and sedimentary microbial biogeography in lakes. Here, we investigated the microbial community composition (MCC) of the water (n = 35) and sediment (n = 35) samples from 16 lakes in western China (salinity: freshwater to salt saturation; pairwise geographical distance: 9-2027 km) using high...

The Carboniferous and early Permian were critical intervals in the diversification of early four-limbed vertebrates (tetrapods), yet the major patterns of diversity and biogeography during this time remain unresolved. Previous estimates suggest that global tetrapod diversity rose continuously across this interval and that habitat fragmentation following the 'Carboniferous rainforest collapse' (...

In this paper, I review the relevance of the niche to biogeography, and what biogeography may tell us about the niche. The niche is defined as the combination of abiotic and biotic conditions where a species can persist. I argue that most biogeographic patterns are created by niche differences over space, and that even 'geographic barriers' must have an ecological basis. However, we know little...