0000000000293536
AUTHOR
Jonathan D. Kennedy
Diversification and community assembly of the world’s largest tropical island
Aim: The species diversity and endemism of tropical biotas are major contributors to global biodiversity, but the factors underlying the formation of these systems remain poorly understood. Location: The world's largest tropical island, New Guinea. Time period: Miocene to present. Major taxa studied: Passerine birds. Methods: We first generated a species-level phylogeny of all native breeding passerine birds to analyse spatial and elevational patterns of species richness, species age and phylogenetic diversity. Second, we used an existing dataset on bill morphology to analyse spatial and elevational patterns of functional diversity. Results: The youngest New Guinean species are principally …
ECOLOGICAL LIMITS ON DIVERSIFICATION OF THE HIMALAYAN CORE CORVOIDEA
Within regions, differences in the number of species among clades must be explained by clade age, net diversification rate, or immigration. We examine these alternatives by assessing historical causes of the low diversity of a bird parvorder in the Himalayas (the core Corvoidea, 57 species present), relative to its more species rich sister clade (the Passerida, ∼400 species present), which together comprise the oscine passerines within this region. The core Corvoidea contain ecologically diverse species spanning a large range of body sizes and elevations. Despite this diversity, on the basis of ecological, morphological, and phylogenetic information, we infer that the best explanation for t…