Paula Posadas

Bridging historical and ecological approaches in biogeography

The practice of biogeography is rooted in disciplines that traditionally have had little intellectual exchange and yielded two complementary biogeographic approaches: ecological and historical biogeography. The aim of this paper is to review alternative biogeographic approaches in the context of spatial analysis. Biogeography can be used to set priorities for conservation of biological diversity, but also to design strategies to control biological invasions and vectors of human diseases, to provide information about the former distribution of species, and to guide development of ecological restoration initiatives, among other applications. But no one of these applications could be fully carried out until an integrative framework on biogeography, which bridges biogeographical historical and ecological paths of thinking, has been developed. Although we do not propose a new biogeographic method, we highlight the causes and consequences of the lack of a conceptual framework integrating ecology and history in biogeography, and how this required framework would allow biogeography to be fully utilised in fields such as conservation.

A preliminar overview of species composition and geographical distribution of Malvinian weevils (Insecta: Coleoptera: Curculionidae)

The objective of this paper is to provide an integrative approach to species composition and distributional information on the weevil fauna of Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands). A total of 22 species belonging to 11 Curculionidae genera are recorded for the archipelago. Four of these genera belong to Entiminae (i.e., Caneorhinus, Cylydrorhinus, Malvinius, and Morronia) and the remaining seven belong to Cyclominae (i.e., Antarctobius, Falklandiellus, Falklandius, Germainiellus; Haversiella, Lanteriella, and Puranius). The Malvinian weevil fauna could be considered as an impoverished version of that from Tierra del Fuego at the generic level, but with a very high degree of species level endemism. The Malvinian weevil fauna exhibits a great linkage to that from southernmost South America. It has been postulated that the evolution of Malvinian weevil fauna responded to several geodispersal and subsequent vicariant events which determined the archipelago ́s alternative connections and disconnections from southern South America. These events were due to sea-level variations induced by glacial-eustatic agents during Tertiary and Quaternary times. Finally, synonymic lists are provided for each species known to occur on the islands. Also, distributional data for each species are mapped and keys and illustrations are presented to identify weevil taxa recorded for the Islas Malvinas.

Where is historical biogeography going? The evolution of the discipline in the first decade of the 21st century:

It has been argued that historical biogeography, the study of how processes that occur over long periods of time influence the distribution of life forms, is in the midst of a scientific revolution. The aim of this paper is to analyze the evolution of historical biogeography during the first decade of the 21st century and to identify major trends for the near future. We constructed a database containing all articles which dealt with historical biogeography published in the Journal of Biogeography during 1998–2010. The database included 610 contributions. Our results indicated that historical biogeography is going through a growth period. The papers analyzed were written by 2018 authors, with a mean of 3.3 authors per paper. Authors from 62 countries were involved, and most of them worked in Europe or North America. The Palearctic was the most analyzed region. Most contributions dealt with terrestrial habitats and were devoted to animal (especially Chordata) and plant taxa. Phylogeography was the most used approach (35%), followed by biota similarity and PAE (13%) and molecular biogeography (12%), with cladistic biogeography and event-based methods at 6% each. Some of the future challenges that historical biogeography faces are summarized: (1) to increase the study of taxa which are underrepresented according to the segment of biodiversity they represent; (2) to balance the amount of work devoted to different biogeographical regions; (3) to increase biogeographical knowledge of aquatic habitats; (4) to maintain the diversity of approaches, preventing the reduction of time, spatial, and taxonomic scales addressed by the discipline; and (5) to continue integrating historical biogeography along with other sources of information from other disciplines (e.g. ecology, paleontology, geology, isotope chemistry, remote sensing) into a richer context for explaining past, present, and future patterns of biodiversity on Earth.