Biogeography: multidisciplinary approaches in space and time

Abstract

news and update ISSN 1948-6596 symposium summary Biogeography: multidisciplinary approaches in space and time International Biogeography Society Early-Career Conference 2014 – Canberra, Australia, 7–11 th January 2014 In January 2014, the second Early-Career Confer- ence of the IBS was held in Canberra, Australia, organized by The Australian National University (ANU) and CSIRO. The conference was attended by 130 biogeographers: approximately half were students and the rest mainly early-career re- searchers. The attendees came from 18 countries, representing Australia and New Zealand, Asia, Af- rica, Europe and the Americas. Three days of oral and poster presentations in three symposia— covering species’ distributions, phylogenetic methods and biodiversity turnover—were pre- ceded by a day of four workshops on the same topics. These cross-cutting themes describe a great bulk of recent biogeographic research, and we report the highlights from each symposium. Species’ distributions across time and space The first day’s symposium, Species’ distributions across space and time, focused primarily on un- derstanding factors influencing species’ spatial distributions, and transferring those insights to other times and places. The organisers chose this topic in response to the continued growth in the development and application of methods that in- fer species’ ecology from geographic data. This symposium offered an opportunity to survey cut- ting-edge research and recent technological ad- vances in the field, and to highlight some of the standing challenges of research taking an ecologi- cal approach to biogeography. Presentations in this symposium ranged from studies of microclimate to global-scale stud- ies of the distribution of biodiversity and the use of models to predict species’ distributions in the past, present and future. The two keynotes admi- rably demonstrated this breadth of scales: Mi- chael Kearney (University of Melbourne) discussed how models integrating species’ physiology and microclimate occupancy with environmental data can be scaled up to make predictions of the suit- ability of habitat, while Catherine Graham (Stony Brook University) presented new methods for studying the mechanisms underlying global distri- butions of beta diversity, and how that diversity might respond to climate change. Many of the talks focused on methodologi- cal studies and applications of species’ distribution modelling (SDM). These studies use species’ oc- currence data in conjunction with environmental variables in order to construct mathematical mod- els of the species’ tolerances, which are used to predict the relative suitability of habitat over space. These methods have faced some fairly se- vere criticisms in recent years (Bahn and McGill 2007, Rodriguez-Rey et al. 2013), but there is also empirical evidence demonstrating that they can produce useful estimates of habitat suitability (Guisan et al. 2013). Talks in this symposium dis- cussed choice of predictor variables, the inclusion of new data sources such as biotic interactions, natural history, evolutionary history and spatial sampling bias. One clear message from the sym- posium was the huge momentum for application of spatial modelling techniques outside terrestrial ecosystems, and for the incorporation of data sources beyond the traditional environmental lay- ers. For example, talks provided examples of the development and application of modelling tools for a diverse array of marine systems, clearly a growth area for biogeography. Other talks focused on improving model performance through the incorporation of archaeological, palynological, and fossil data, providing promising ways forward for better calibration of species’ distribution models. While the use of SDMs in biogeography is still growing, the talks presented here made it clear that many users are working towards incorporat- ing more biological insight into the modelling process. Advances in phylogenetic methods for bio- geography The integration of geography with phylogenetics frontiers of biogeography 6.2, 2014 — © 2014 the authors; journal compilation © 2014 The International Biogeography Society