Earth history events shaped the evolution of uneven biodiversity across tropical moist forests.

ABSTRACT: Far from a uniform band, the biodiversity found across Earth's tropical moist forests varies widely between the high diversity of the Neotropics and Indomalaya and the relatively lower diversity of the Afrotropics. Explanations for this variation across different regions, the "pantropical diversity disparity" (PDD), remain contentious, due to difficulty teasing apart the effects of contemporary climate and paleoenvironmental history. Here, we assess the ubiquity of the PDD in over 150,000 species of terrestrial plants and vertebrates and investigate the relationship between the present-day climate and patterns of species richness. We then investigate the consequences of paleoenvironmental dynamics on the emergence of biodiversity gradients using a spatially explicit model of diversificatio

SUBMITTER: Hagen O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8501849 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature