Beetles of Peru: Biogeography

Abstract

Peru is the third largest country in South America, after Brazil and Argentina. Administratively, Peru is divided into 24 Regiones (formerly Departamentos) each with a regional government and capital. The two largest cities are Lima and Arequipa. Below is a broad outline of Peru’s geography, vegetation, and habitats. Peru’s 1.285 sq. km. lie entirely within the tropics from the equator to ,18uS latitude. This latitudinal position of Peru, along with changes in the strength of the coastal oceanic currents, fosters a zonation of climate from north to south. Peru’s topography is complex, due to the age and orogeny of the Andes Mountains (Antonelli et al., 2009; Hoorn et al., 2010) and the evolution of Amazonia (Hoorn and Wesselingh, 2010). The Peruvian Andes are relatively young mountains dating to the Cretaceous, with periodic uplifting events over the past 50 ma years (Hoorn et al. 2010) above the subduction zone where the Nazca plate slides beneath the South American plate. The Peruvian landscape has three broad geographic zones running longitudinally in a north to south axis—coastal desert (or Costa), central Andes (or Sierras), and eastern wet forest zone (or Selva) with the headwaters of the Amazon River and the Amazon basin. These broad zones roughly correspond to Peru’s climate regions. Brack (1986) recognized nine terrestrial ecoregions. Additionally, 83 of 104 life zones defined in the Holdridge system are