Dataset Information

Soils on exposed Sunda shelf shaped biogeographic patterns in the equatorial forests of Southeast Asia.

ABSTRACT: The marked biogeographic difference between western (Malay Peninsula and Sumatra) and eastern (Borneo) Sundaland is surprising given the long time that these areas have formed a single landmass. A dispersal barrier in the form of a dry savanna corridor during glacial maxima has been proposed to explain this disparity. However, the short duration of these dry savanna conditions make it an unlikely sole cause for the biogeographic pattern. An additional explanation might be related to the coarse sandy soils of central Sundaland. To test these two nonexclusive hypotheses, we performed a floristic cluster analysis based on 111 tree inventories from Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, and Borneo. We then identified the indicator genera for clusters that crossed the central Sundaland biogeographic boundary and those that did not cross and tested whether drought and coarse-soil tolerance of the indicator genera differed between them. We found 11 terminal floristic clusters, 10 occurring in Borneo, 5 in Sumatra, and 3 in Peninsular Malaysia. Indicator taxa of clusters that occurred across Sundaland had significantly higher coarse-soil tolerance than did those from clusters that occurred east or west of central Sundaland. For drought tolerance, no such pattern was detected. These results strongly suggest that exposed sandy sea-bed soils acted as a dispersal barrier in central Sundaland. However, we could not confirm the presence of a savanna corridor. This finding makes it clear that proposed biogeographic explanations for plant and animal distributions within Sundaland, including possible migration routes for early humans, need to be reevaluated.

SUBMITTER: Slik JW

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3145692 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Soils on exposed Sunda shelf shaped biogeographic patterns in the equatorial forests of Southeast Asia.

Slik J W Ferry JW Aiba Shin-Ichiro S Bastian Meredith M Brearley Francis Q FQ Cannon Charles H CH Eichhorn Karl A O KA Fredriksson Gabriella G Kartawinata Kuswata K Laumonier Yves Y Mansor Asyraf A Marjokorpi Antti A Meijaard Erik E Morley Robert J RJ Nagamasu Hidetoshi H Nilus Reuben R Nurtjahya Eddy E Payne John J Permana Andrea A Poulsen Axel D AD Raes Niels N Riswan Soedarsono S van Schaik Carel P CP Sheil Douglas D Sidiyasa Kade K Suzuki Eizi E van Valkenburg Johan L C H JL Webb Campbell O CO Wich Serge S Yoneda Tsuyoshi T Zakaria Rahmad R Zweifel Nicole N

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20110711 30

The marked biogeographic difference between western (Malay Peninsula and Sumatra) and eastern (Borneo) Sundaland is surprising given the long time that these areas have formed a single landmass. A dispersal barrier in the form of a dry savanna corridor during glacial maxima has been proposed to explain this disparity. However, the short duration of these dry savanna conditions make it an unlikely sole cause for the biogeographic pattern. An additional explanation might be related to the coarse s ...[more]

PMID: 21746913

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Project description:Episodic sea level changes that repeatedly exposed and inundated the Sunda Shelf characterize the Pleistocene. Available evidence points to a more xeric central Sunda Shelf during periods of low sea levels, and despite the broad land connections that persisted during this time, some organisms are assumed to have faced barriers to dispersal between land-masses on the Sunda Shelf. Eutropis rugifera is a secretive, forest adapted scincid lizard that ranges across the Sunda Shelf. In this study, we sequenced one mitochondrial (ND2) and four nuclear (BRCA1, BRCA2, RAG1, and MC1R) markers and generated a time-calibrated phylogeny in BEAST to test whether divergence times between Sundaic populations of E. rugifera occurred during Pleistocene sea-level changes, or if they predate the Pleistocene. We find that E. rugifera shows pre-Pleistocene divergences between populations on different Sundaic land-masses. The earliest divergence within E. rugifera separates the Philippine samples from the Sundaic samples approximately 16 Ma; the Philippine populations thus cannot be considered conspecific with Sundaic congeners. Sundaic populations diverged approximately 6 Ma, and populations within Borneo from Sabah and Sarawak separated approximately 4.5 Ma in the early Pliocene, followed by further cladogenesis in Sarawak through the Pleistocene. Divergence of peninsular Malaysian populations from the Mentawai Archipelago occurred approximately 5 Ma. Separation among island populations from the Mentawai Archipelago likely dates to the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary approximately 3.5 Ma, and our samples from peninsular Malaysia appear to coalesce in the middle Pleistocene, about 1 Ma. Coupled with the monophyly of these populations, these divergence times suggest that despite consistent land-connections between these regions throughout the Pleistocene E. rugifera still faced barriers to dispersal, which may be a result of environmental shifts that accompanied the sea-level changes.

Dataset Information

Soils on exposed Sunda shelf shaped biogeographic patterns in the equatorial forests of Southeast Asia.

Publications

Soils on exposed Sunda shelf shaped biogeographic patterns in the equatorial forests of Southeast Asia.

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