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Accumulation over evolutionary time as a major cause of biodiversity hotspots in conifers.

ABSTRACT: Biodiversity hotspots are important for understanding how areas of high species richness form, but disentangling the processes that produce them is difficult. We combine geographical ranges, phylogenetic relationships and trait data for 606 conifer species in order to explore the mechanisms underlying richness hotspot formation. We identify eight richness hotspots that overlap known centres of plant endemism and diversity, and find that conifer richness hotspots occur in mountainous areas within broader regions of long-term climate stability. Conifer hotspots are not unique in their species composition, traits or phylogenetic structure; however, a large percentage of their species are not restricted to hotspots and they rarely show either a preponderance of new radiating lineages or old relictual lineages. We suggest that conifer hotspots have primarily formed as a result of lineages accumulating over evolutionary time scales in stable mountainous areas rather than through high origination, preferential retention of relictual lineages or radiation of species with unique traits, although such processes may contribute to nuanced differences among hotspots. Conifers suggest that a simple accumulation of regional diversity can generate high species richness without additional processes and that geography rather than biology may play a primary role in hotspot formation.

SUBMITTER: Sundaram M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6790781 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Accumulation over evolutionary time as a major cause of biodiversity hotspots in conifers.

Sundaram Mekala M Donoghue Michael J MJ Farjon Aljos A Filer Denis D Mathews Sarah S Jetz Walter W Leslie Andrew B AB

Proceedings. Biological sciences 20191009 1912

Biodiversity hotspots are important for understanding how areas of high species richness form, but disentangling the processes that produce them is difficult. We combine geographical ranges, phylogenetic relationships and trait data for 606 conifer species in order to explore the mechanisms underlying richness hotspot formation. We identify eight richness hotspots that overlap known centres of plant endemism and diversity, and find that conifer richness hotspots occur in mountainous areas within ...[more]

PMID: 31594500

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Project description:With the ongoing crisis of biodiversity loss and limited resources for conservation, the concept of biodiversity hotspots has been useful in determining conservation priority areas. However, there has been limited research into how temporal variability in biodiversity may influence conservation area prioritization. To address this information gap, we present an approach to evaluate the temporal consistency of biodiversity hotspots in large marine ecosystems. Using a large scale, public monitoring dataset collected over an eight year period off the US Pacific Coast, we developed a methodological approach for avoiding biases associated with hotspot delineation. We aggregated benthic fish species data from research trawls and calculated mean hotspot thresholds for fish species richness and Shannon's diversity indices over the eight year dataset. We used a spatial frequency distribution method to assign hotspot designations to the grid cells annually. We found no areas containing consistently high biodiversity through the entire study period based on the mean thresholds, and no grid cell was designated as a hotspot for greater than 50% of the time-series. To test if our approach was sensitive to sampling effort and the geographic extent of the survey, we followed a similar routine for the northern region of the survey area. Our finding of low consistency in benthic fish biodiversity hotspots over time was upheld, regardless of biodiversity metric used, whether thresholds were calculated per year or across all years, or the spatial extent for which we calculated thresholds and identified hotspots. Our results suggest that static measures of benthic fish biodiversity off the US West Coast are insufficient for identification of hotspots and that long-term data are required to appropriately identify patterns of high temporal variability in biodiversity for these highly mobile taxa. Given that ecological communities are responding to a changing climate and other environmental perturbations, our work highlights the need for scientists and conservation managers to consider both spatial and temporal dynamics when designating biodiversity hotspots.

Dataset Information

Accumulation over evolutionary time as a major cause of biodiversity hotspots in conifers.

Publications

Accumulation over evolutionary time as a major cause of biodiversity hotspots in conifers.

Similar Datasets

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