From the members: On the biogeography of biogeographers

Abstract

membership corner ISSN 1948‐6596 from the members On the biogeography of biogeographers Biogeography is concerned with “the study at all possible scales of analysis of the distribution of life across space, and how, through time, it has changed” (Whittaker et al. 2005). It is a long es‐ tablished field of research, with its roots in the early nineteenth century. Recently, the fifth IBS International Meeting was held in Irakleion, Crete, where the latest scientific research in relation to biogeography was presented by biogeographers from around the world. The list of topics covered in this conference was comprehensive: there were four symposia covering Mediterranean biogeogra‐ phy, comparative phylogeography, biogeography and ecology, and analytical advancements in mac‐ roecology and biogeography; and six sessions with contributed papers on island biogeography, cli‐ mate change biogeography, conservation biogeog‐ raphy, palaeoecology, marine biogeography and hot topics in biogeography. Overall, there were 63 talks and 271 poster presentations covering a wide range of biogeographical topics. However I noticed that the geographical origin of the attendees of the conference was less diverse: the majority were from the US and Europe and I was surprised to see only a few re‐ searchers from South America and Asia and practi‐ cally none from Africa. In a relatively advanced field such as biogeography, concerned with distri‐ bution patterns, I found it slightly ironic that the diversity of the biogeographers at this meeting was relatively low. Out of the total of 334 contri‐ butions at the meeting, nearly 60 percent of the authors came from a European institution and 26 percent from North American ones, whereas 7 percent of the first authors came from Central and South America, just about 5 percent from Asia, 2 percent from Oceania, and only 0.3 percent from Africa. So I wondered: where were our colleagues from these regions? I wanted to know whether the low propor‐ tion of researchers from outside of Europe and North America at the IBS meeting is representa‐ tive for the wider academic biogeography commu‐ nity, so I investigated recent contributions pub‐ lished in the four main biogeography journals. I looked up all articles published during 2010 in Journal of Biogeography, Global Ecology and Bio‐ geography, Diversity and Distributions and Ecogra‐ phy, and counted and classified them into six geo‐ graphical regions according to the United Nations Statistics Division (2010) composition of macro‐ geographical regions based on the first mentioned affiliation of the first author of the paper. I consid‐ ered a total of 490 papers in these four journals and found that 45 percent had a first author affili‐ ated with an institution in Europe, 29 percent had a first author from North America, nearly 13 per‐ cent from Oceania, just about 5 percent from Asia, 4 percent from Central and South America, and only 4 percent from Africa. The fact that the proportion of Europeans was relatively high at the conference is logical since the conference was being held in Europe and thus easier to attend for researchers based in this part of the world. The opposite is true for bio‐ geographers from Oceania, who were underrepre‐ sented, probably because of the large distance they had to travel to attend the conference. How‐ ever, considering these minor differences, the geographical distribution of the biogeographers attending the conference seems to correspond with the distribution of those publishing in the four journals. Thus, it would be fair to say that the biogeographers at the IBS meeting were fairly rep‐ resentative of the wider publishing biogeography community in terms of their geographical origin. There are of course various factors contrib‐ uting to the observed patterns, and I will refrain from attempting to explain them. Moreover, the manner in which I classified the publications does not acknowledge the contribution from co‐ authors affiliated with institutions outside of Europe and North America, which is likely to hide a wider international participation. Nevertheless, it is interesting to be aware of the geographical distribution of biogeography researchers and en‐ courage further participation and contributions from underrepresented regions. For example, it frontiers of biogeography 3.1, 2011 — © 2011 the authors; journal compilation © 2011 The International Biogeography Society