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Udvardy I. faunal region, also called Zoogeographic Region, any of six or seven areas of the world defined by animal geographers on the basis of their distinctive animal life. . the clusters obtained for bats, where islands are more prominently featured, in appendix S1). SL JC T BA 2006) and R-mode and Q-mode analyses (which would permit the definition of regions and characteristic groups at the same time; Birks and Deacon 1973, Thuiller et al. Wallace Note: The total number of genera meeting the 50%-match criterion is given in parentheses after each region's name (there are no characteristic terrestrial genera for the Arctic, Andean, Polynesian, and Antarctic regions). Logical and statistical derivation of the regions, Interactions between environment, species traits, and human uses describe patterns of plant invasions, A Classification of the Biogeographic Provinces of the World, International Union for Conservation of Nature, The delimitation of Malaysia and its main plant geographical divisions, The ghosts of Gondwana and Laurasia in modern liverwort distributions, Glacial and deglacial climatic patterns in Australia and surrounding regions from 35000 to 10000 years ago reconstructed from terrestrial and near-shore proxy data, Biogeography and conservation in Southeast Asia: How 2.7 million years of repeated environmental fluctuations affect today's patterns and the future of the remaining refugial-phase biodiversity, WildFinder: Online database of species distributions, Has vicariance or dispersal been the predominant biogeographic force in Madagascar? 1992), but biogeographical regionalization has a lot more to do with history, although historical biogeography hypotheses are often limited to describing the rather ancient sequence of tectonic events in the splitting of Gondwana and Laurasia (e.g., Boyer et al. Our regionalization study does confirm the importance of history, although it can be argued that some environmentally determined boundaries, when they are maintained for sufficiently long periods, act as historical barriers as well (see Brown et al. Brown Boyer The zoogeographical regions with the lowest numbers of characteristic genera were the Arctic, Andean, Polynesian, and Antarctic regions (which all had zero characteristic genera), followed by the Wallacean region (which had four such genera). KJ Also given are the genera in each taxonomic group with the highest match values (percentage match; the families they belong to in parentheses; see the text for the calculation of match values). The variation in the geographic coverage of each cluster was generally low in genus-rich regions. Alstrm PJ Article on Geographical Distribution in the. It is unsurprising that the Neotropical region should have the highest number of such genera, given that it contains the largest proportion of Earth's vertebrate diversity (see the histograms in figure 1; also see Newton and Dale 2001). 203: 75-92. Tropical Africa and Australia are the only two regions so well defined that they have characteristic genera in each of the seven major groups considered in table 2. SR 2001) are far from perfect as units of analysis. The letter M, assigned here to Polynesia, is also used for worldwide island assemblages. (2013). HTW Second, two of the procedures we followed here involved a certain degree of subjectivity: One was the selection of the cutoff point (the number of genera) beyond which an ecoregion was included in the relevant analysis, and the second was the selection of cross-taxon matching clusters in each dendrogram. 2009). . The Nearctic, Palearctic, and Andean clusters comprised low generic diversity ecoregions. 1871. R . Van Steenis 66: 271-291. Darlington 2006, Roelants et al. To answer this question, the analysis in which the characteristic genera are sought for each region (genera whose distribution matches the shape of the region well) failed to show any terrestrial genera in the case of the Arctic, Antarctic, Polynesian, and Andean regions, and showed only four genera for the Wallacean region (table 2). Engler In addition, a cluster consistently derived with almost identical coverage but minimal distinctness from the most similar other cluster (the Afrotropical cluster) was represented by the rainforest-dominated ecoregions of Central and West Africa (this was nevertheless very distinctive in the nonvolant mammal analysis; appendix S1). . . . Nearctic Region: North America, excepting the tropical part of Mexico, 5. The world's terrestrial zoogeographical regions were originally outlined by Sclater (1858) and Wallace (1876), primarily on the basis of vertebrates, because their distribution records were the most complete at the time. RM 1991, Jones and Kennedy 2008). Subgroups of vertebrates have already been used to fine-tune analytical methods for delimiting zoogeographical regions (bats in Proche 2005, 2006; all mammals in Smith 1983, Kreft and Jetz 2010), and similar procedures have also been employed for some plant taxa (monocots in Conran 1995; bryophytes in Vanderpoorten et al. In this context, the next steps would have to involve the incorporation of additional taxa, such as higher plants and selected invertebrates, besides vertebrates, in single comprehensive exercises. erban Proche, Syd Ramdhani, The World's Zoogeographical Regions Confirmed by Cross-Taxon Analyses, BioScience, Volume 62, Issue 3, March 2012, Pages 260270, https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2012.62.3.7. Neotropical Region: South and Central America with the tropical part of Mexico. . An Antarctic region can be recognized as the region represented by all southern polar and subpolar ecoregions in which all vertebrates are of marine affinities (see Proche 2001). 2008, Kreft and Jetz 2010) have, on the contrary, highlighted the diversity of approaches that one can take in delimiting biogeographical regions, and there has been wide support (Proche 2008, Cox 2010) for the need for such specialized approaches. Proche Consequently, we relaxed the equal-dissimilarity and equal-numbers-of-clusters conditions and started manually separating clusters on the dendrograms from high to low dissimilarity levels. Berry Kingdon . Related research linking phylogenetics and GIS has been conducted in areas of the southern Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific Oceans. . Crisci MT These 11 clusters are recognized here as zoogeographical regions (figure 2). It can be argued that the World Wide Fund for Nature ecoregions (Olson et al. P Gaines . PF Olsson Blith, E. (1871): A suggested new division of the earth into zoological regions. . E Presented are the relationships between the clusters of ecoregions (see the text for details), maps of the clusters, and histograms of generic diversity across clusters for (a) all tetrapod vertebrates, (b) herpetofauna, (c) birds, and (d) mammals. Allen, J. . Broadley Holt, B. G., et al. Richardson . J

G Leemans The differences between clusters derived for the herpetofauna, birds, and mammals (figure 2b, 2c, 2d) need to be explained case by case. G CFB The family assignment was according to the data set (WWF 2010), except where taxonomic changes were recognized in recent years (e.g., Alstrm et al. The rapid progress made in phylogenetic analysis suggests, however, that such steps could be achieved relatively quickly, should regionalization research gather similar momentum, and indeed, phylogenetic and regionalization analyses could be integrated (very promising steps were recently made by Pavoine et al. It has been highlighted before that, ideally, a study of this nature should be based on equal-area units free of predetermined biogeographical meaning (Proche 2005). DJ More accurately, for both plants and animals, it will soon become possible to employ shared phylogenetic branch length (Pagel 1994) rather than shared taxa, in calculating similarity values for broad animal groups. [1], As a multifaceted field of study, zoogeography incorporates methods of molecular biology, genetics, morphology, phylogenetics, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to delineate evolutionary events within defined regions of study around the globe.

R After we finalized the boundaries of the zoogeographical regions, the characteristic genera for each region were identified on the basis of the match between their distribution (at the ecoregion level) and the extent of the zoogeographical region. . 2007, Kelly et al. However, this is clearly just a taxon-size effect; the distribution of the herpetofauna as a whole is virtually identical to the sum of those of the other two groups. Three further zoogeographical regions recognized in prior regionalization studies could not be confirmed here because of the nature of our data set and methods. & Ladle, R. J. Science, vol. 2007; also cf. The borders viewed here as environmentally determined are either caused by humiddry contrasts (AfrotropicalPalearctic, New GuineanAustralian) or, more often, by differences in temperature (tropicaltemperate in the case of the NeotropicalAndean, NeotropicalNearctic, and Indo-MalaysianPalearctic differences, although humidity differences also play a role along parts of these borderlines, and temperatepolar for all borders in the case of the Arctic; see Prentice et al. CG What can molecular genetics contribute to marine biogeaography? Wilkinson . SD T Foster History and taxonomy: Their roles in the core-satellite hypothesis, Hotspots Revisited: Earth's Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions, Biogeographic areas and transition zones of Latin America and the Caribbean islands based on panbiogeographic and cladistic analyses of the entomofauna, A comparative analysis of the avifaunas of different zoogeographical regions, Terrestrial ecoregions of the world: A new map of life on Earth, Detecting correlated evolution on phylogenies: A general method for the comparative analysis of discrete characters, Linking patterns in phylogeny, traits, abiotic variables and space: A novel approach to linking environmental filtering and plant community assembly, A global biome model based on plant physiology and dominance, soil properties and climate, Back to the sea: Secondary marine organisms from a biogeographical perspective, The world's biogeographical regions: Cluster analyses based on bat distributions, Latitudinal and longitudinal barriers in global biogeography, Dissecting the plant-insect diversity relationship in the Cape, Global patterns of diversification in the history of modern amphibians, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Towards a biogeographic regionalization of the European biota, On the general geographical distribution of the members of the class Aves, Zoological Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, A system of world mammal faunal regions. 1887. Kershaw Jones Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zoogeography&oldid=1079400370, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the Encyclopedia Americana with a Wikisource reference, Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikisource reference, Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the New International Encyclopedia, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Australasia province (= Australian; Eastern Palaeotropical), Realm Megagea (Arctogea): the main part of the world, 1. Dale Palearctic Region: Eurasia above the tropics, with the northern corner of Africa, 4. 2004) and ecoregions (Olson et al. SP Systematischer Theil. These patterns can be explained by the Palearctic and Madagascar clusters' having relatively impoverished faunas (Smith 1983) compared with the neighboring Indo-Malaysian and Afrotropical clusters. . J N Other clusters with lower stability were (a) a transitional zone between the Nearctic and the Neotropical region, (b) a transitional zone between the Neotropical and the Andean region, and (c) a transitional zone between the Palearctic and the Indo-Malaysian region. . Giam Roelants One of the three groups separated here (the herpetofauna) is paraphyletic to the other two (birds and mammals; Hugall et al. Beyond these data-related caveats, the statement that the world's biogeographical regions can indeed be confirmed across taxa following rigorous analysesour main proposition in this articleneeds to be dissected further. The geographical and geological distribution of animals. On the other hand, the complex series of steps needed to reproduce these regions, although these steps are largely repeatable, involves at this stage a number of questionable decisions, and substantial progress in biogeographical cluster analysis techniques will be needed to eliminate these. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Benavides KE 2001), despite their being largely intuitive and often imprecise, in focusing global conservation initiatives. DG PJ This analysis was used to determine the borderlines between the Arctic and the NearcticPalearctic regions and those between the Polynesian region and the Australian, New Guinean, Wallacean, Paleactic, Neractic, and Andean regions. V Sclater, P.L.

The degree of match was calculated by multiplying a measure of occupancy (the percentage of the ecoregions in a zoogeographical region where a genus occurs) by a measure of endemicity (the percentage of ecoregions where a genus occurs located in that zoogeographical region). In genus-poor areas, notable differences were (a) the inclusion of southeastern Europe in the Sahero-Arabian cluster in the herpetofauna analysis, where the Palearctic proper is restricted to temperate China; (b) the absence of the Caribbean and temperate South American clusters in the herpetofaunal analysis (both falling entirely below the cutoff number of genera); and (c) the absence of the Caribbean cluster in the mammal analysis (the temperate South American cluster is present in this case but is reduced to only six ecoregions in coastal Peru and Ecuador and is less than obvious in figure 1). DM 2002; hawk moths in Beck et al. Note: This table simply indicates rough equivalence between units, even if the names differed. 2011). Savolainen Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. Zoogeography is the branch of the science of biogeography that is concerned with geographic distribution (present and past) of animal species. GC .

Birks Sets of clusters obtained in this manner, showing maximum similarity in ecoregional composition across the four selected vertebrate groups, were mapped. Familial classification has recently changed substantially (e.g., Alstrm et al. . JH Sibson 2006). MSY