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Quantifying Phytogeographical Regions of Australia Using Geospatial Turnover in Species Composition

The largest digitized dataset of land plant distributions in Australia assembled to date (750,741 georeferenced herbarium records; 6,043 species) was used to partition the Australian continent into phytogeographical regions. We used a set of six widely distributed vascular plant groups and three non...

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Autores principales: González-Orozco, Carlos E., Ebach, Malte C., Laffan, Shawn, Thornhill, Andrew H., Knerr, Nunzio J., Schmidt-Lebuhn, Alexander N., Cargill, Christine C., Clements, Mark, Nagalingum, Nathalie S., Mishler, Brent D., Miller, Joseph T.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3962426/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24658356
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0092558
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author González-Orozco, Carlos E.
Ebach, Malte C.
Laffan, Shawn
Thornhill, Andrew H.
Knerr, Nunzio J.
Schmidt-Lebuhn, Alexander N.
Cargill, Christine C.
Clements, Mark
Nagalingum, Nathalie S.
Mishler, Brent D.
Miller, Joseph T.
author_facet González-Orozco, Carlos E.
Ebach, Malte C.
Laffan, Shawn
Thornhill, Andrew H.
Knerr, Nunzio J.
Schmidt-Lebuhn, Alexander N.
Cargill, Christine C.
Clements, Mark
Nagalingum, Nathalie S.
Mishler, Brent D.
Miller, Joseph T.
author_sort González-Orozco, Carlos E.
collection PubMed
description The largest digitized dataset of land plant distributions in Australia assembled to date (750,741 georeferenced herbarium records; 6,043 species) was used to partition the Australian continent into phytogeographical regions. We used a set of six widely distributed vascular plant groups and three non-vascular plant groups which together occur in a variety of landscapes/habitats across Australia. Phytogeographical regions were identified using quantitative analyses of species turnover, the rate of change in species composition between sites, calculated as Simpson's beta. We propose six major phytogeographical regions for Australia: Northern, Northern Desert, Eremaean, Eastern Queensland, Euronotian and South-Western. Our new phytogeographical regions show a spatial agreement of 65% with respect to previously defined phytogeographical regions of Australia. We also confirm that these new regions are in general agreement with the biomes of Australia and other contemporary biogeographical classifications. To assess the meaningfulness of the proposed phytogeographical regions, we evaluated how they relate to broad scale environmental gradients. Physiographic factors such as geology do not have a strong correspondence with our proposed regions. Instead, we identified climate as the main environmental driver. The use of an unprecedentedly large dataset of multiple plant groups, coupled with an explicit quantitative analysis, makes this study novel and allows an improved historical bioregionalization scheme for Australian plants. Our analyses show that: (1) there is considerable overlap between our results and older biogeographic classifications; (2) phytogeographical regions based on species turnover can be a powerful tool to further partition the landscape into meaningful units; (3) further studies using phylogenetic turnover metrics are needed to test the taxonomic areas.
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spelling pubmed-39624262014-03-24 Quantifying Phytogeographical Regions of Australia Using Geospatial Turnover in Species Composition González-Orozco, Carlos E. Ebach, Malte C. Laffan, Shawn Thornhill, Andrew H. Knerr, Nunzio J. Schmidt-Lebuhn, Alexander N. Cargill, Christine C. Clements, Mark Nagalingum, Nathalie S. Mishler, Brent D. Miller, Joseph T. PLoS One Research Article The largest digitized dataset of land plant distributions in Australia assembled to date (750,741 georeferenced herbarium records; 6,043 species) was used to partition the Australian continent into phytogeographical regions. We used a set of six widely distributed vascular plant groups and three non-vascular plant groups which together occur in a variety of landscapes/habitats across Australia. Phytogeographical regions were identified using quantitative analyses of species turnover, the rate of change in species composition between sites, calculated as Simpson's beta. We propose six major phytogeographical regions for Australia: Northern, Northern Desert, Eremaean, Eastern Queensland, Euronotian and South-Western. Our new phytogeographical regions show a spatial agreement of 65% with respect to previously defined phytogeographical regions of Australia. We also confirm that these new regions are in general agreement with the biomes of Australia and other contemporary biogeographical classifications. To assess the meaningfulness of the proposed phytogeographical regions, we evaluated how they relate to broad scale environmental gradients. Physiographic factors such as geology do not have a strong correspondence with our proposed regions. Instead, we identified climate as the main environmental driver. The use of an unprecedentedly large dataset of multiple plant groups, coupled with an explicit quantitative analysis, makes this study novel and allows an improved historical bioregionalization scheme for Australian plants. Our analyses show that: (1) there is considerable overlap between our results and older biogeographic classifications; (2) phytogeographical regions based on species turnover can be a powerful tool to further partition the landscape into meaningful units; (3) further studies using phylogenetic turnover metrics are needed to test the taxonomic areas. Public Library of Science 2014-03-21 /pmc/articles/PMC3962426/ /pubmed/24658356 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0092558 Text en © 2014 Gonzalez-Orozco et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
González-Orozco, Carlos E.
Ebach, Malte C.
Laffan, Shawn
Thornhill, Andrew H.
Knerr, Nunzio J.
Schmidt-Lebuhn, Alexander N.
Cargill, Christine C.
Clements, Mark
Nagalingum, Nathalie S.
Mishler, Brent D.
Miller, Joseph T.
Quantifying Phytogeographical Regions of Australia Using Geospatial Turnover in Species Composition
title Quantifying Phytogeographical Regions of Australia Using Geospatial Turnover in Species Composition
title_full Quantifying Phytogeographical Regions of Australia Using Geospatial Turnover in Species Composition
title_fullStr Quantifying Phytogeographical Regions of Australia Using Geospatial Turnover in Species Composition
title_full_unstemmed Quantifying Phytogeographical Regions of Australia Using Geospatial Turnover in Species Composition
title_short Quantifying Phytogeographical Regions of Australia Using Geospatial Turnover in Species Composition
title_sort quantifying phytogeographical regions of australia using geospatial turnover in species composition
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3962426/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24658356
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0092558
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