Phylogenetic biome conservatism on a global scale

By M. Crisp, M. Arroyo, L. Cook, M. Gandolfo, Gregory J. Jordan, M. McGlone, Peter H. Weston, M. Westoby, P. Wilf, H. Linder. Nature, 2009

685 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How and why organisms are distributed as they are has long intrigued evolutionary biologists. The tendency for species to retain their ancestral ecology has been demonstrated in distributions on local and regional scales, but the extent of ecological conservatism over tens of millions of years and across continents has not been assessed. Here we show that biome stasis at speciation has outweighed biome shifts by a ratio of more than 25:1, by inferring ancestral biomes for an ecologically diverse sample of more than 11,000 plant species from around the Southern Hemisphere. Stasis was also prevalent in transocean colonizations. Availability of a suitable biome could have substantially influenced which lineages establish on more than one landmass, in addition to the influence of the rarity of the dispersal events themselves. Conversely, the taxonomic composition of biomes has probably been strongly influenced by the rarity of species’ transitions between biomes. This study has implications for the future because if clades have inherently limited capacity to shift biomes, then their evolutionary potential could be strongly compromised by biome contraction as climate changes.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7903038abe66bf486e17f2c604bc3cc5b4b6d445

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Citations in the corpus

Why are there so many plant species in the Neotropics (2011, background): “New York: Hafner. including poor taxon sampling, and it is exceptionally difficult to separate speciation and extinction rates from net diversification estimates (Crisp & Cook, 2009; Cusimano & Renner, 2010; Rabosky, 2010).”
Phylogenetic relationships and distribution of New World Melastomeae (Melastomataceae) (2013, background): “…distribution of the pedoconnective clade could have been accomplished through successive colonization of neighbouring or similar environments (as described by Crisp et al., 2009) and by ‘niche crawling’ from one environment to another, and the ultimate result would be a broad distribution.”
Biome Shifts and Niche Evolution in Plants (2014, background): “F or p er so na l u se o nl y. ES45CH24-Donoghue ARI 31 October 2014 15:49 connections existed at relevant times (e.g., Crisp et al. 2009).”
Evolution of New Zealand alpine and open-habitat plant species during the late Cenozoic (2013, background): “Phylogeny and biogeography of Southern Hemisphere high-mountain Cardamine species (Brassicaceae).”
Decline of a biome: evolution, contraction, fragmentation, extinction and invasion of the Australian mesic zone biota (2011, neutral): “…derived from Hypotheses 1 and 2, phylogenies that dated to, or earlier than, 30 Ma were trait-mapped using parsimony in Mesquite (Maddison & Maddison, 2007) as applied by Crisp et al. (2009) to determine whether the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) was reconstructed as inhabiting the mesic zone.”
Splendid and Seldom Isolated: The Paleobiogeography of Patagonia (2013, background): “However, molecular data indicate an important historical role for transoceanic dispersal into and out of southern South America for many plant and animal groups (Sanmartı́n & Ronquist 2004), and biome matching appears to be the strongest filter, at least for plants (Crisp et al. 2009).”
Extent and timing of floristic exchange between Australian and Asian rain forests (2011, background): “than by taxa from the local mesotherm rain forest flora, consistent with widespread evidence for the importance of phylogenetic biome conservatism (Crisp et al., 2009).”
Plant DNA barcodes and a community phylogeny of a tropical forest dynamics plot in Panama (2009, background): “Such studies will have a bearing on the factors that govern not only local plant community assembly and dynamics, but also on understanding niche conservation and the dynamics of species composition at landscape and global scales (30, 31).”
Ultramafic soils and species sorting in the flora of New Caledonia (2010, background): “Using 45 groups of vascular plants of the southernHemisphere, Crisp et al. (2009) found evidence for phylogenetic biome conservatism, which is a tendency for plant lineages to occupy the same biome after transoceanic dispersal.”
Islands in the sky or squeezed at the top? Ecological causes of elevational range limits in montane salamanders (2012, background): “Instead, we anticipate that the factors driving species ’ elevational range limits will be explained by the principle of phylogenetic niche conservatism and the evolutionary history of the taxon in question (Crisp et al. 2009, Wiens et al. 2010).”
Global diversity and geography of soil fungi (2014, background): “The relatively stronger climatic and edaphic drivers of richness at the class and phylum level suggest that phylogenetic niche conservatism in fungal lineages is similar to cross-biome distribution patterns in vascular plants (46) and protists (47).”
Recent assembly of the Cerrado, a neotropical plant diversity hotspot, by in situ evolution of adaptations to fire (2009, methodology): “The in situ assembly of the endemic rich Cerrado flora via frequent recent adaptive shifts to resist fire stands in contrast to the widespread support for ideas that lineages tend to maintain their ancestral ecologies (8, 11, 13) and that dispersal of preadapted lineages has played an important role”
Dispersal patterns in space and time: a case study of Apiaceae subfamily Apioideae (2013, background): “A recent study of ecologically diverse samples of more than 11,000 plant species from the Southern Hemisphere demonstrated that the tendency for species to retain their ancestral ecology over tens of millions of years and across continents is a common phenomenon, both for speciation events within la”
Phylogeny and biogeography in Solanaceae, Verbenaceae and Bignoniaceae: a comparison of continental and intercontinental diversification patterns (2013, background): “The processes involved in successful migration and adaptation present a continuum from migration and diversification in closely similar environments, referred to as ‘niche conservatism’ (Harvey & Pagel, 1991; Wiens & Donoghue, 2004), or ‘biome conservatism’ when considered on a global scale (Crisp e”
Biogeography and diversification of colletid bees (Hymenoptera: Colletidae): emerging patterns from the southern end of the world (2012, background): “Based on the geographical pattern of diversity of extant species, it is safe to assert that colletid bees are particularly fond of dry temperate and subtropical areas (Michener, 1979, 2007), and it is reasonable to assume biome conservatism in the absence of evidence to the contrary (Crisp et al., 2”