The role of the uplift of the Qinghai‐Tibetan Plateau for the evolution of Tibetan biotas

By Adrien Favre, M. Päckert, S. Pauls, S. Jähnig, D. Uhl, Ingo Michalak, A. Muellner‐Riehl. Biological Reviews of The Cambridge Philosophical Society, 2015

724 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Biodiversity is unevenly distributed on Earth and hotspots of biodiversity are often associated with areas that have undergone orogenic activity during recent geological history (i.e. tens of millions of years). Understanding the underlying processes that have driven the accumulation of species in some areas and not in others may help guide prioritization in conservation and may facilitate forecasts on ecosystem services under future climate conditions. Consequently, the study of the origin and evolution of biodiversity in mountain systems has motivated growing scientific interest. Despite an increasing number of studies, the origin and evolution of diversity hotspots associated with the Qinghai‐Tibetan Plateau (QTP) remains poorly understood. We review literature related to the diversification of organisms linked to the uplift of the QTP. To promote hypothesis‐based research, we provide a geological and palaeoclimatic scenario for the region of the QTP and argue that further studies would benefit from providing a complete set of complementary analyses (molecular dating, biogeographic, and diversification rates analyses) to test for a link between organismic diversification and past geological and climatic changes in this region. In general, we found that the contribution of biological interchange between the QTP and other hotspots of biodiversity has not been sufficiently studied to date. Finally, we suggest that the biological consequences of the uplift of the QTP would be best understood using a meta‐analysis approach, encompassing studies on a variety of organisms (plants and animals) from diverse habitats (forests, meadows, rivers), and thermal belts (montane, subalpine, alpine, nival). Since the species diversity in the QTP region is better documented for some organismic groups than for others, we suggest that baseline taxonomic work should be promoted.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/40d60bc8df6752d457a96e299d7d9540098152e9

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Citations in the corpus

In and out of the Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau: divergence time estimation and historical biogeography of the large arctic‐alpine genus Saxifraga L. (2017, background): “The vast majority of studies investigating the origin of Journal of Biogeography 44, 900–910 ª 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 904 Tibetan biota have either focused on endemic clades or have suffered from biased sampling towards Tibetan taxa (Favre et al., 2015).”
A tale of worldwide success: Behind the scenes of Carex (Cyperaceae) biogeography and diversification (2019, background): “That colonization predates by about 12 Mya the detected diversi ﬁ cation shift at the Late Miocene (8.2 Mya), a period where a major uplift of the Himalaya and neighboring mountains has been reported (Zhisheng et al., 2001) together with cooling on the Qinghai ‐ Tibetan Plateau (Favre et al., 2015).”
Building mountain biodiversity: Geological and evolutionary processes (2019, background): “Evolutionary radiations of species are often associated with phases of active uplift, suggesting that orogenic processes play a role in driving 40 diversification (14, 22, 23) (Fig.”
Phylogeography of Quercus aquifolioides provides novel insights into the Neogene history of a major global hotspot of plant diversity in south‐west China (2017, background): “Radiative speciation processes have received much attention as putative keys to a better understanding of the emergence of diversity hotspots (e.g. Hoorn et al., 2010; Favre et al., 2015).”
Uplift-driven diversification in the Hengduan Mountains, a temperate biodiversity hotspot (2017, background): “The mountains form three distinct hotspots of biodiversity that respectively lie to the west, south, and east of the QTP’s central high desert: the Central Asian mountains (Altai and Tianshan ranges), the Himalayas, and the Hengduan Mountains region (4) (Fig.”
Out‐of‐Tibet: the spatio‐temporal evolution of Gentiana (Gentianaceae) (2016, background): “3; Favre et al., 2015).”
Why mountains matter for biodiversity (2019, background): “Examples of this are young mountain systems such as the Andes, the Himalaya and the Hengduan Mountains (Favre et al., 2015; Madriñán, Cortés, & Richardson, 2013; Spicer, 2017; Su et al., 2019; Xing & Ree, 2017).”
Evolutionary origin of species diversity on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (2021, background): “Due to its spatially complex configurations of topography and climate, the QTPsl encompasses many endemic amphibians, birds, mammals, and plants, especially at its southeastern margin (the Henduan Mountains and the eastern Himalaya) (Eldrett et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2012b; Favre et al., 2015; Rah”