Biogeography, third edition

Abstract

Placing populations and their attributes into a geographic context is currently the thing to do. Partly this may be because mapping has been revolutionized by geographic information systems (GIS) technology and the increasing power of desktop computers. Also, molecular data now allow inference of monophyla that are worth mapping; and for population-level analyses, there is phylogeography (Avise, 2000), a statistically rigorous way of overlaying geography onto an estimated gene tree to measure the strength of geography/phylogeny associations. Age estimation from molecular sequences has emerged as another powerful new tool. With access to absolute times, evolution can be linked to geological events and, for the first time, the most recent arrival of a lineage in an area can be estimated, which is different from the information gained from fossils. Inferring the historical assembly of ecological communities via the comparison of multiple dated phylogenies is a recent outgrowth of this ability (Webb et al., 2002; Pennington et al., 2004). Lastly, the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution (Thompson, 2005), although hardly full-fledged (Herre, 2006), may have added further to the excitement about the geographic context of evolution and adaptation.