Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T01:34:06.548Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Climate and diversity: the role of history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

By
Andrew Clarke
Edited by
David Storch ,
Pablo Marquet  and
James Brown
Andrew Clarke
Affiliation:
British Antarctic Survey
David Storch
Affiliation:
Charles University, Prague
Pablo Marquet
Affiliation:
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
James Brown
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
Get access

Summary

Introduction

It has been known for over two centuries that the diversity of land plants, in the familiar sense of species richness, is not distributed evenly over the surface of the earth (von Humboldt, 1808). Similar patterns were soon established for terrestrial animals (Wallace, 1876) but it was a long time before our knowledge of marine organisms was sufficient to determine large-scale biogeographic patterns in the sea. Although humans had long exploited the nearshore and continental shelf seas for food and other resources, it was not until the pioneering oceanographic voyages of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that we began to determine similar global patterns of marine biogeography (Angel, 1994, 1997). We now recognize that, as a broad generalization, diversity on land and in the sea attains its highest values in the tropics and is lowest at the poles, with temperate regions often intermediate (Gaston, 2000; Chown & Gaston, 2000).

Although these global scale (macroecological) patterns in diversity are dramatic, we still lack an agreed explanation for their cause. We can correlate these patterns with a range of environmental variables but ecology based solely on correlations is incomplete. We might be able to use such correlations to make predictions (Peters, 1983, 1991) but predictions without an underlying mechanistic understanding have limited usefulness because we lack knowledge of the conditions under which those predictions might break down.

Type
Chapter
Information
Scaling Biodiversity , pp. 225 - 245
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ackerman, J. L., Bellwood, D. R. & Brown, J. H. (2004). The contribution of small individuals to density-body size relationships: examination of energetic equivalence in reef fishes. Oecologia, 139, 568–571.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Allen, A. P., Brown, J. H. & Gillooly, J. F. (2002). Global biodiversity, biochemical kinetics, and the energy-equivalence rule. Science, 297, 1545–1548.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alroy, J., Marshall, C. R., Bambach, R. K., et al. (2001). Effects of sampling standardisation on estimates of Phanerozoic marine diversification. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 98, 6261–6266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, K. J. & Jetz, W. (2005). The broad-scale ecology of energy expenditure of endotherms. Ecology Letters, 8, 310–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Angel, M. V. (1994). Spatial distribution of marine organisms: patterns and processes. In Large Scale Ecology and Conservation Biology, ed. Edwards, P. J., May, R. M. & Webb, N. R., pp. 59–109. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications.Google Scholar
Angel, M. V. (1997). Pelagic biodiversity. In Marine Biodiversity: Causes and Consequences, ed. Ormond, R. F. G., Gage, J. D. & Angel, M. V., pp. 35–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bambach, R. K. (1977). Species richness in marine habitats through the Phanerozoic. Paleobiology, 3, 152–167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barthlott, W., Lauer, W. & Placke, A. (1996). Global distribution of species diversity in vascular plants: towards a world map of phytodiversity. Erdkunde, 50, 317–327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Briggs, J. C. (2003). Marine centres of origin as evolutionary engines. Journal of Biogeography, 30, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Briggs, J. C. (2004). Older species: a rejuvenation on coral reefs. Journal of Biogeography, 31, 525–530.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bromham, L. (2002). Molecular clocks in reptiles: life history influences rate of molecular evolution. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 19, 302–309.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bromham, L. & Cardillo, M. (2003). Testing the link between the latitudinal gradient in species richness and rates of molecular evolution. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 16, 200–207.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, J. H., Allen, A. P. & Gillooly, J. F. (2003). Response to heat and biodiversity (Huston). Science, 299, 512–513.Google Scholar
Brown, J. H., Gillooly, J. F., Allen, A. P., Savage, V. M. & West, G. B. (2004). Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology, 85, 1771–1789.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, J. M. & Pauly, G. B. (2005). Increased rates of molecular evolution in an equatorial plant clade: an effect of environment or phylogenetic nonindependence. Evolution, 59, 238–242.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bush, A. M., Markey, M. J. & Marshall, C. R. (2004). Removing bias from diversity curves: the effects of spatially organized biodiversity on sampling-standardization. Paleobiology, 30, 666–686.2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buzas, M. A., Collins, L. S. & Culver, S. J. (2002). Latitudinal difference in biodiversity caused by higher tropical rate of diversification. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99, 7841–7843.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cardillo, M. (1999). Latitude and rates of diversification in birds and butterflies. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, Series B, 266, 1221–1225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chown, S. L. & Gaston, K. J. (2000). Areas, cradles and museums: the latitudinal gradient in species richness. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 15, 311–315.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chown, S. L., Sinclair, B. J., Leinas, H. P. & Gaston, K. J. (2004). Hemispheric asymmetries in biodiversity – a serious matter for ecology. PLoS Biology, 2, 1701–1707.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, J. S. (1998). Why trees migrate so fast: confronting theory with dispersal biology and the paleorecord. American Naturalist, 152, 204–224.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clarke, A. (2003). Costs and consequences of evolutionary temperature adaptation. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 18, 573–581.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, A. & Crame, J. A. (1989). The origin of the Southern Ocean marine fauna. In Origins and Evolution of the Antarctic Biota, ed. Crame, J. A., pp. 253–268. London: The Geological Society.Google Scholar
Clarke, A. & Crame, J. A. (1992). The Southern Ocean benthic fauna and climate change: a historical perspective. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 338, 299–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, A. & Crame, J. A. (1997). Diversity, latitude and time: patterns in the shallow sea. In Marine Biodiversity: Causes and Consequences, ed. Ormond, R. F. G., Gage, J. D. & Angel, M. V., pp. 122–147. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, A. & Crame, J. A. (2003). The importance of historical processes in global patterns of diversity. In Macroecology: Concepts and Consequences, ed. Blackburn, T. M. & Gaston, K. J., Vol. 43, pp. 130–151. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Clarke, A. & Gaston, K. J. (2006). Climate, energy and diversity. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 273, 2257–2266.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clarke, A. & Johnston, N. M. (1999). Scaling of metabolic rate with body mass and temperature in teleost fish?Journal of Animal Ecology, 68, 893–905.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, A. & Johnston, N. M. (2003). Antarctic marine benthic diversity. Oceanography and Marine Biology: an Annual Review, 41, 47–114.Google Scholar
Crame, J. A. (2001). Taxonomic diversity gradients through geological time. Diversity and Distributions, 7, 175–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crame, J. A. & Clarke, A. (1997). The historical component of taxonomic diversity gradients. In Marine Biodiversity: Causes and Consequences, ed. Ormond, R. F. G., Gage, J. D. & Angel, M. V., pp. 258–273. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crampton, J. S., Beu, A. G., Cooper, R. A., Jones, C. M., Marshall, B. & Maxwell, P. A. (2003). Estimating the rock volume bias in paleobiodiversity studies. Science, 301, 358–360.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Currie, D. J. (1991). Energy and large-scale patterns of animal and plant species richness. American Naturalist, 137, 27–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Damuth, J. (1987). Interspecific allometry of population density in mammals and other animals: the independence of body mass and population energy use. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 31, 193–246.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Davies, T. J., Barraclough, T. G., Savolainen, V. & Chase, M. W. (2004). Environmental causes for plant biodiversity gradients. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 359, 1645–1656.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dunton, K. (1992). Arctic biogeography: the paradox of the marine benthic fauna and flora. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 7, 183–189.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dynesius, M. & Jansson, R. (2000). Evolutionary consequences of changes in species' geographical distributions driven by Milankovitch climate oscillations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97, 9115–9120.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Evans, K. L., Warren, P. H. & Gaston, K. J. (2004). Species-energy relationships at the macroecological scale: a review of the mechanisms. Biological Reviews, 79, 1–25.Google Scholar
Flessa, K. W. & Jablonski, D. (1996). The geography of evolutionary turnover: a global analysis of extant bivalves. In Evolutionary Paleobiology, ed. Jablonski, D., Erwin, D. H. & Lipps, J. H., pp. 376–397. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Foote, M. (2005). Pulsed origination and extinction in the marine realm. Paleobiology, 31, 6–20.2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foote, M. & Sepkoski, J. J. (1999). Absolute measures of the completeness of the fossil record. Nature, 398, 415–417.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Francis, A. P. & Currie, D. J. (2003). A globally consistent richness-climate relationship for angiosperms. American Naturalist, 161, 523–536.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gaston, K. J. (2000). Global patterns in biodiversity. Nature, 405, 220–227.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gates, D. M. (1993). Climate Change and its Biological Consequences. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.Google Scholar
Gillooly, J. F., Allen, A. P., West, G. B. & Brown, J. H. (2005). The rate of DNA evolution: effects of body size and temperature on the molecular clock. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102, 140–145.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldberg, E. E., Roy, K., Lande, R. & Jablonski, D. (2005). Diversity, endemism, and age distributions in macroevolutionary sources and sinks. American Naturalist, 165, 623–633.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gulick, J. T. (1872). On the variation of species as related to their geographical distribution, illustrated by the Achatinellinae. Nature, 6, 222–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, B. A., Field, R., Cornell, H. V., et al. (2003). Energy, water, and broad-scale geographic patterns of species richness. Ecology, 84, 3105–3117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Held, C. (2001). No evidence for slow-down of molecular substitution rates at subzero temperatures in Antarctic serolid isopods (Crustacea, Isopoda, Serolidae). Polar Biology, 24, 497–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hubbell, S. P. (2001). The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, G. E. (1959). Homage to Santa Rosalia, or why are there so many kinds of animals?American Naturalist, 93, 145–159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irigoien, X., Huisman, J. & Harris, R. P. (2004). Global biodiversity patterns of marine phytoplankton and zooplankton. Nature, 429, 863–867.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jablonski, D., Roy, K., Valentine, J. W., Price, R. M. & Anderson, P. S. (2003). The impact of the pull of the recent on the history of marine diversity. Science, 300, 1133–1135.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jansson, R. & Dynesius, M. (2002). The fate of clades in a world of recurrent climatic change: Milankovitch oscillations and evolution. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 33, 741–777.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerr, J. T. & Packer, L. (1997). Habitat heterogeneity as a determinant of mammal species richness in high-energy regions. Nature, 385, 252–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kier, G., Mutke, J., Dinerstein, E., et al. (2005). Global patterns of plant diversity and floristic knowledge. Journal of Biogeography, 32, 1107–1116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lear, C. H., Elderfield, H. & Wilson, P. H. (2000). Cenozoic deep-sea temperatures and global ice volumes from Mg/Ca in benthic foraminiferal calcite. Science, 287, 269–272.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lovegrove, B. G. (2000). The zoogeography of mammalian basal metabolic rate. American Naturalist, 156, 201–219.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lovegrove, B. G. (2003). The influence of climate on the basal metabolic rate of small mammals: a slow-fast metabolic continuum. Journal of Comparative Physiology B, 173, 87–112.Google ScholarPubMed
MacArthur, R. H. (1964). Environmental factors affecting bird species diversity. American Naturalist, 98, 387–397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marko, P. B. (2004). “What's larvae got to do with it?” Disparate patterns of post-glacial population structure in two benthic marine gastropods with identical dispersal potential. Molecular Ecology, 13, 597–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marquet, P. A., Navarrete, S. A. & Castilla, J. C. (1995). Body size, population density and the energy-equivalence rule. Journal of Animal Ecology, 64, 325–332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, A. P. (1995). Metabolic rate and directional nucleotide substitution in animal mitochondrial DNA. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 12, 1124–1131.Google ScholarPubMed
Marzluff, J. M. & Dial, K. P. (1991). Life history correlates of taxonomic diversity. Ecology, 72, 428–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers, A. A. (1994). Biogeographic patterns in shallow-water marine systems and the controlling processes at different scales. In Aquatic Ecology: Scale, Pattern and Process, ed. Giller, P. S., Hildrew, A. G. & Raffaelli, D. G., pp. 547–574. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications.Google Scholar
Nee, S. (2004). Extinct meets extant: simple models in palaeontology and molecular phylogenetics. Paleobiology, 30, 172–178.2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Öpik, H. & Rolfe, S. A. (2005). The Physiology of Flowering Plants. 4th edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palumbi, S. R. (1996). What can molecular genetics contribute to marine biogeography? An urchin's tale. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 203, 75–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palumbi, S. R. (1997). Molecular biogeography of the Pacific. Coral Reefs, 16, S47–S52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pawar, S. S. (2005). Geographical variation in the rate of evolution: effect of available energy or fluctuating environment. Evolution, 59, 234–237.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Peters, R. H. (1983). The Ecological Implications of Body Size. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, R. H. (1991). A Critique for Ecology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pianka, E. R. (1967). On lizard species diversity: North American flatland deserts. Ecology, 48, 333–350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Qian, H. & Ricklefs, R. E. (1999). A comparison of the taxonomic richness of vascular plants in China and the United States. American Naturalist, 154, 160–181.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Qian, H. & Ricklefs, R. E. (2000). Large-scale processes and the Asian bias in species diversity of temperate plants. Nature, 407, 180–182.Google ScholarPubMed
Quigg, A., Finkel, Z. V., Irwin, A. J., et al. (2003). The evolutionary inheritance of elemental stoichiometry in marine phytoplankton. Nature, 425, 291–294.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Recher, H. F. (1969). Bird species diversity and habitat diversity in Australiia and North America. American Naturalist, 103, 75–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenzweig, M. L. (1995). Species Diversity in Space and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, K., Jablonski, D., Valentine, J. W. & Rosenberg, G. (1998). Marine latitudinal diversity gradients: tests of causal hypotheses. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 95, 3699–3702.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Signor, P. W. (1985). Real and apparent trends in species richness through time. In Phanerozoic Diversity Patterns: Profiles in Macroevolution, ed. Valentine, J. W., pp. 129–150. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, A. B. & Jeffrey, C. H. (1998). Selectivity of extinction among sea urchins at the end of the Cretaceous period. Nature, 392, 69–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steele, J. H. (1985). A comparison of terrestrial and marine ecological systems. Nature, 313, 355–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stommel, H. (1963). Varieties of oceanographic experience. Science, 139, 572–576.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Storch, D. (2003). Comment on “global biodiversity, biochemical kinetics, and the energy-equivalence rule”. Science, 299, 346b.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valentine, J. W. (1966). Numerical analysis of marine molluscan ranges on the extratropical northeastern Pacific shelf. Limnology and Oceanography, 11, 198–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verheyen, K. & Hermy, M. (2001). The relative importance of dispersal limitation of vascular plants in secondary forest succession in Muizen Forest, Belgium. Journal of Ecology, 89, 829–840.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vermeij, G. J. (1991). Anatomy of an invasion: the trans-Arctic interchange. Paleobiology, 17, 281–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Humboldt, A. (1808). Ansichten der Natur mit wissenschaftlichen Erlauterungen. Tübingen: J. G. Cotta.Google Scholar
Wallace, A. R. (1876). The Geographical Distribution of Animals: With a Study of the Relations of Living and Extinct Faunas as Elucidating the Past Changes of the Earth's Surface. New York: Harper.Google Scholar
Walters, S. M. (1986). The name of the rose: a review of ideas on the European bias in angiosperm classification. New Phytologist, 104, 527–546.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whittaker, R. H. (1972). Evolution of measurements of species diversity. Taxon, 21, 213–251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willis, J. C. (1922). Age and Area: A Study in Geographical Distribution and Origin of Species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Willis, J. C. & Yule, G. U. (1922). Some statistics of evolution and geographical distribution in plants and animals, and their significance. Nature, 109, 177–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, D. H., Currie, D. J. & Maurer, B. A. (1993). Energy supply and patterns of species richness on local and regional scales. In Species Diversity in Ecological Communities: Historical and Geographical Perspectives, ed. Ricklefs, R. E. & Schluter, D., pp. 66–74. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wright, S. D., Gray, R. D. & Gardner, R. C. (2003). Energy and the rate of evolution: inferences from plant rDNA substitution rates in the western Pacific. Evolution, 57, 2893–2898.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Xiang, Q.-Y., Zhang, W. H., Ricklefs, R. E., et al. (2004). Regional differences in rates of plant speciation and molecular evolution: a comparison between eastern Asia and eastern North America. Evolution, 58, 2175–2184.Google ScholarPubMed

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×