Islands conserve high species richness and areas of endemism of Hormaphidinae aphids.

Abstract

Patterns of biodiversity and endemism are important and form the foundation for biogeography and conservation studies. Hormaphidinae is an aphid group mainly distributed in the Sino-Japanese, Oriental, and Nearctic zoogeographic realms. To infer the areas of endemism of Hormaphidinae aphids in the Sino-Japanese and Oriental realms, we employed a geographical distribution dataset covering all 225 species in subfamily Hormaphidinae. In total, 1,245 distribution occurrence records for all species were analyzed in addition to the number of species in a certain grid cell to calculate species richness. Two methods (parsimony analysis of endemicity (PAE) and the use of an optimization criterion—NDM/VNDM) using a total of 6 grid sizes were applied to detect possible areas of endemism and to assess the probable effects of the 2 different methods and 6 grid sizes on the results of the patterns of the areas of endemism. The results revealed that islands presented most of the areas with high species richness and endemic species, particularly Japan, Taiwan Island, Java Island, the Malaysian Peninsula, southeast Himalaya, and the Hengduan Mountains. Most of these areas of endemism were located on islands or a peninsula. Islands were therefore shown to play an essential role in facilitating the formation of high species richness and endemism. Different grid sizes directly determined the regions of the areas of endemism, with small grid sizes tending to detect small and discrete areas of endemism and large grid sizes identifying continuous areas of endemism. In terms of the two methods, NDM/VNDM was found to identify more areas of endemism than PAE.