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
By D. Woodruff. Biodiversity and Conservation, 2010
449 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Understanding the historical biogeography of this global biodiversity hotspot is as important to long-term conservation goals as ecology and evolution are to understanding current patterns and processes. Today’s geography is, however, misleading and typical of only ~2% of the last million years; >90% of that time the region’s land area was 1.5–2.0 times larger as mean sea levels were 62 m below today’s, climates were cooler, and extensive forests and savanna covered the emerged Sunda plains. The region’s land area varied two-fold as sea levels fluctuated up to ±50 m with each of ~50 Pleistocene glacial cycles, and forests expanded and contracted with oscillations in land area and seasonality. This dynamic geographic history is relevant to the development of biogeographic regionalism and shows that it is today’s forests that are refugial, not those of the Last Glacial Maximum. This history affects how species will adapt or shift their ranges in response to global warming and further decreases in land area (submergence of low-lying coastal areas) during the 21st century. The alternative is mass species extinction. The biota is also threatened by the continued destruction of forest, destruction of Mekong River flood-pulse based ecosystems, and continued human population growth. Human biogeography will become more important in conservation planning as tens of millions of people who depend on protected area forests, riverine ecosystems, and coastal habitats become environmental refugees. Conservation scientists need to become more involved in regional ecological education, environmental stewardship, and ecosystem-based adaptation to sustain as much as possible of this rich biota and the ecological services it provides.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52e08bbcc55895b2061b87c0895ce80e1466882e
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Ecology
In Global and Planetary Change
In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Citations in the corpus
- West to east dispersal and subsequent rapid diversification of the mega‐diverse genus Begonia (Begoniaceae) in the Malesian archipelago (2012, background): “…Petermannia (> 270 species) in the Pliocene and Pleistocene coincides with rapid orogenesis on Sulawesi and New Guinea (Moss & Wilson, 1998; Hall, 2009), as well as pronounced sealevel and climate fluctuations and associated shifts in forest distributions (Cannon et al., 2009; Woodruff, 2010).”
- A Biogeographic Synthesis of the Amphibians and Reptiles of Indochina (2011, background): “It is clear, though, that major forest types expanded in Southeast Asia during the Quaternary’s hypothermal phases and that at present evergreen forests cover a substantially smaller area than during the LGM (Cannon et al., 2009; Woodruff, 2010).”
- DNA Barcoding Indonesian freshwater fishes: challenges and prospects (2015, background): “inland fisheries, introduction of alien species) perturbations resulting in the modification of habitats, destruction of spawning grounds and the decline of populations [6-9].”
- Shifting seas: the impacts of Pleistocene sea‐level fluctuations on the evolution of tropical marine taxa (2015, background): “Lower sea levels almost doubled the exposed land in Southeast Asia (Woodruff, 2010) and resulted in restricted connections between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.”