ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Earth history events shaped the evolution of uneven biodiversity across tropical moist forests.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
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38 citing papers in PubMed, 129 citations in OpenAlex.
- Macroevolutionary dynamics and predictors of tropical rain forest plant diversity.Science advances · 2026Article
- Extreme greenhouse warmth triggered the two major floristic turnover events of the past 120 million years.Nature plants · 2026Article
- Evolutionary Patterns Under Climatic Influences on the Distribution of thePlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Analogous environments across the tropics have similar levels of tree species alpha diversity.National science review · 2026Article
- Inversion of the latitudinal diversity gradient at high taxonomic level in liverworts revealed by a phylogenetically deconstructive approach.Annals of botany · 2025Article
- A theoretical framework for scaling ecological niches from individuals to species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Storms Are an Important Driver of Change in Tropical Forests.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Linking energetic instability to compositional changes in biological communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Large range sizes link fast life histories with high species richness across wet tropical tree floras.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Environmental filtering, not dispersal history, explains global patterns of phylogenetic turnover in seed plants at deep evolutionary timescales.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Global patterns and drivers of species and genera richness of Fabaceae.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Article
- The macro-eco-evolutionary interplay between dispersal, competition and landscape structure in generating biodiversity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Trait-mediated speciation and human-driven extinctions in proboscideans revealed by unsupervised Bayesian neural networks.Science advances · 2024Article
- Evidence of thermophilization in Afromontane forests.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Landform and lithospheric development contribute to the assembly of mountain floras in China.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Regional uniqueness of tree species composition and response to forest loss and climate change.Nature communications · 2024Article
- DeepDive: estimating global biodiversity patterns through time using deep learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The global pattern of epiphytic liverwort disparity: insights from Frullania.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Ecological niche conservatism spurs diversification in response to climate change.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Deep biogeographic barriers explain divergent global vertebrate communities.Nature communications · 2024Article
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5 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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 diversification coupled with paleoenvironmental and plate tectonic reconstructions. Contemporary climate is insufficient in explaining the PDD; instead, a simple model of diversification and temperature niche evolution coupled with paleoaridity constraints is successful in reproducing the variation in species richness and phylogenetic diversity seen repeatedly among plant and animal taxa, suggesting a prevalent role of paleoenvironmental dynamics in combination with niche conservatism. The model indicates that high biodiversity in Neotropical and Indomalayan moist forests is driven by complex macroevolutionary dynamics associated with mountain uplift. In contrast, lower diversity in Afrotropical forests is associated with lower speciation rates and higher extinction rates driven by sustained aridification over the Cenozoic. Our analyses provide a mechanistic understanding of the emergence of uneven diversity in tropical moist forests across 110 Ma of Earth's history, highlighting the importance of deep-time paleoenvironmental legacies in determining biodiversity patterns.
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