Evolutionary Biogeography Lecture
Evolutionary Biogeography Lecture
Evolutionary Biogeography Lecture
BIOGEOGRAPHY
The six main faunal regions of the world, based on the distribution of
animals, and particularly of birds and mammals.
Six Main Biogeographical Regions
Realized Niche
• Competing species will often
occupy part of this range and the
competition may be too strong
to permit both species to exist.
Historical Factors
• There are patterns in the distribution of species that probably
cannot be explained by ecological factors alone.
• There may be places where a species ecologically could be
present, but it is absent because it has never arrived - that is,
never migrated and established itself.
• Ex. The grey squirrel for instance has never reached islands off the British mainland and
consequently red squirrels can still be found on them.
Geographic distributions are influenced
by dispersal
Dispersal - A species’ range will be
changed if members of the species move
in space.
- Individual animals and plants move,
actively and passively, through space
both in order to seek out unoccupied
areas and in response to
environmental change.
Center of Origin - place where species
originated in one area and subsequently
dispersed to fill out its existing
distribution.
Various dispersal routes
Corridors- Two places are
joined by a corridor if they are
part of the same land mass.
Animals can move easily along a
corridor and any two place joined
by a corridor will have a high
degree of faunal similarity.
Various dispersal routes
• When climates cooled in the Ice Age, the ranges of species in the northern
hemisphere moved to the south.
• In the encounter between the North and South American faunas when the Isthmus of
Panama formed 3 million years ago, similar proportions of mammals initially moved in
both directions; but the immigrant north American mammals in the south proliferated
at a greater rate.
The End.
Thank you!