Where is historical biogeography going? The evolution of the discipline in the first decade of the 21st century

Abstract

It has been argued that historical biogeography, the study of how processes that occur over long periods of time influence the distribution of life forms, is in the midst of a scientific revolution. The aim of this paper is to analyze the evolution of historical biogeography during the first decade of the 21st century and to identify major trends for the near future. We constructed a database containing all articles which dealt with historical biogeography published in the Journal of Biogeography during 1998–2010. The database included 610 contributions. Our results indicated that historical biogeography is going through a growth period. The papers analyzed were written by 2018 authors, with a mean of 3.3 authors per paper. Authors from 62 countries were involved, and most of them worked in Europe or North America. The Palearctic was the most analyzed region. Most contributions dealt with terrestrial habitats and were devoted to animal (especially Chordata) and plant taxa. Phylogeography was the most used approach (35%), followed by biota similarity and PAE (13%) and molecular biogeography (12%), with cladistic biogeography and event-based methods at 6% each. Some of the future challenges that historical biogeography faces are summarized: (1) to increase the study of taxa which are underrepresented according to the segment of biodiversity they represent; (2) to balance the amount of work devoted to different biogeographical regions; (3) to increase biogeographical knowledge of aquatic habitats; (4) to maintain the diversity of approaches, preventing the reduction of time, spatial, and taxonomic scales addressed by the discipline; and (5) to continue integrating historical biogeography along with other sources of information from other disciplines (e.g. ecology, paleontology, geology, isotope chemistry, remote sensing) into a richer context for explaining past, present, and future patterns of biodiversity on Earth.