Australia's marine biogeography revisited: Back to the future?

By J. Waters, T. Wernberg, S. Connell, M. Thomsen, G. Zuccarello, G. Kraft, J. C. Sanderson, J. West, C. Gurgel. 2010

85 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recognition of broad biogeographic provinces provides an important framework for ecological and conservation biological research. Marine biologists have long recognized distinct biogeographic provinces in southern Australia, primarily on the basis of qualitative differences in intertidal species assemblages. Here we provide an a priori test for these traditional eastern (Peronian), western (Flindersian) and south-eastern (Maugean) provinces. Specifically, we analyse distributional data for approximately 1500 algal species using the newly available Australian Virtual Herbarium, an online database of herbarium specimens. Our quantitative algal analyses across southern Australia identify three distinct biogeographic assemblages, consistent with traditional qualitative provinces. We argue that these broad provinces provide a highly effective framework for understanding and managing Australia's marine biodiversity. In particular, biogeographic provinces provide a regional framework for integrating the ongoing discovery of biological variation at finer scales. More broadly therefore we recommend that biologists undertake quantitative analyses to test provincial biogeographic boundaries around the globe.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Genetics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/960c1827d7c44ab002fc4e755c821fe5de6e7102

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Citations in the corpus

Variation in the strength of continental boundary currents determines continent‐wide connectivity in kelp (2011, unknown): “Within each current, we avoided sampling across known biogeographic breaks (Waters et al. 2010) or other potential barriers to dispersal.”
A realignment of marine biogeographic provinces with particular reference to fish distributions (2012, background): “…and Southeastern (Peronian) provinces of Australia (Briggs, 1995), based on the work of Bennett & Pope (1953, 1960), are still recognized in the recent literature (Waters et al., 2010), although the provincial Journal of Biogeography 39, 12–30 21 ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd names have varied.”
The 'Great Southern Reef': social, ecological and economic value of Australia's neglected kelp forests (2016, background): “…radiata (Connell and Irving 2008;Marzinelli et al. 2015), these regions have been connected through the Bass Strait for only,10 000 years (Waters 2008) and still have low genetic connectivity (Waters 2008; Coleman et al. 2013) and distinct biogeographical affinities (Waters et al. 2010).”
Impacts of climate change in a global hotspot for temperate marine biodiversity and ocean warming (2011, background): “It straddles three biogeographic provinces (Waters et al., 2010) and includes some of the most pristine temperate coast in the world, as well as several areas which are heavily populated.”
Patterns of landscape and assemblage structure along a latitudinal gradient in ocean climate (2012, background): “Considerable heterogeneity in the composition and abundance of biological communities may exist within any particular biogeographic level, mainly within large spatial units, and so a more detailed classification system is recommended (Spalding et al. 2007, Waters et al. 2010).”