0000000001302497
AUTHOR
H. Peter Linder
Consistent phenological shifts in the making of a biodiversity hotspot: the Cape flora
Abstract Background The best documented survival responses of organisms to past climate change on short (glacial-interglacial) timescales are distributional shifts. Despite ample evidence on such timescales for local adaptations of populations at specific sites, the long-term impacts of such changes on evolutionary significant units in response to past climatic change have been little documented. Here we use phylogenies to reconstruct changes in distribution and flowering ecology of the Cape flora - South Africa's biodiversity hotspot - through a period of past (Neogene and Quaternary) changes in the seasonality of rainfall over a timescale of several million years. Results Forty-three dist…
Diversification in evolutionary arenas - assessment and synthesis
Abstract Understanding how and why rates of evolutionary diversification vary is a central issue in evolutionary biology and ecology. The concept of adaptive radiation has attracted much interest, but is metaphorical and verbal in nature, making it difficult to quantitatively compare different evolutionary lineages or geographic regions. In addition, the causes of evolutionary stasis are relatively neglected. Here we review the central concepts in the evolutionary diversification literature and bring these together by proposing a general framework for estimating rates of diversification and quantifying their underlying dynamics, which can be applied across clades and regions and across spat…
Diversification in evolutionary arenas – assessment and synthesis
Understanding how and why rates of evolutionary diversification vary is a central issue in evolutionary biology, ecology and biogeography. The concept of adaptive radiation has attracted much interest, but is metaphorical and verbal in nature, making it difficult to quantitatively compare different evolutionary lineages or geographic regions. In addition, the causes of evolutionary stasis are relatively neglected. Here we review the central concepts in the evolutionary diversification literature and bring these together by proposing a general framework for studying rates of diversification and quantifying their underlying dynamics, which can be applied across clades and regions and across s…