Update: A cure for seeing double? Convergence and unification in biogeography and ecology

Abstract

news and update ISSN 1948-6596 update A cure for seeing double? Convergence and unification in biogeography and ecology More perspectives are presented by Biogeography and ecology: two views of one world (Jenkins and Ricklefs 2011a) 1 than are enumerated in the title. This collection of ten papers targets, and reveals much about, the “converge[nce of biogeography and ecology] at intermediate spatial and temporal scales”; yet “lingering differences” hint at the challenges facing these disciplines during “the cur‐ rent trend towards their unification” (Ricklefs and Jenkins 2011). Approximately twenty years ago, after dec- ades of separation, the disciplines of biogeogra- phy and ecology found common ground spanning intermediate spatial and temporal scales, from metapopulations to regional communities (Jenkins and Ricklefs 2011b) or perhaps from assemblages to species’ ranges (Guisan and Rahbek 2011, Hor‐ tal 2011, Figure 1). Macroecology (Brown 1995) played a pivotal role, providing the raison d’etre and methodology for assembling details on indi- vidual species into broad generalizable pictures of continental diversity (Brown and Maurer 1989). As ecology reached out spatially and back in time to explain, for example, patterns of mammal body size on four major continents (Smith and Lyons 2011), so phylogenetic analyses began organizing species’ traits and then intra-specific ecological variation in an evolutionary framework (Felsenstein 1985, Poulin et al. 2011). So too, the tools for distinguishing species genetically and phenotypically increased, permitting new ques- tions about the relationships between taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity: how do the many forms of biodiversity vary spatially and tem- porally, how do different aspects of diversity re- late across scales, and what does this tell us about community assembly and ecosystem function (Cavender-Bares et al. 2009, Davies and Buckley 2011, Emerson et al. 2011, Weiher et al. 2011. Hortal et al. 2012)? The increasing rate of publica- tion on such issues (Cianciaruso 2011, Jenkins and Ricklefs 2011b, Smith and Lyons 2011) suggests interdisciplinary understanding of the organiza- tion of biodiversity at intermediate spatial and temporal scales is a common goal of ecologists and biogeographers helping to resolve, for exam- ple, the meaning and consequences of the niche (Chase and Myers 2011, Wiens 2011) and of diver- sity (Chiarucci et al. 2011). The image of biogeography and ecology conjured up by this collection is one of many threads at the beginnings of a braid. Each paper is lightly intertwined with another on one of four topics—niche, macroecology and comparative ecology, community assembly, diversity—then wound loosely around each other within the theme (Ricklefs and Jenkins 2011). The strands are held together by only a few connections, encour- aged in advance of the symposium: on average, a few cross-citations and acknowledgement of com- ments on earlier manuscripts. Thus, at present, the natural convergence of biogeography and ecology at intermediate spatial and temporal scales looks more like interdigitation than mutual assimilation of ideas and techniques. The chal- lenge is, in part, overcoming the practical limita- tions of measuring biodiversity across multiple levels of organization and spatial scales of inter- est, and turning the perceptual biases dependent on grain size, spatial extent, and phylogeny into opportunities for developing scale-free formula- tions of biodiversity (Chiarucci et al. 2011) or scal- ing concepts that help merge community ecology with biogeography (Weiher et al. 2011). Overcom- ing this challenge may require taking the organiza- tional model applied in this symposium one or two steps further, attracting individuals from many backgrounds to engage as interdisciplinary teams on common projects. Whether the “trend towards … unification” 1 This August 2011 theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B reports the proceedings of the International Biogeography Society symposium “Biogeography and Ecology: Two Lenses in One Telescope” – see http://www.biogeography.org/html/Meetings/2011/program.html frontiers of biogeography 4.1, 2012 — © 2012 the authors; journal compilation © 2012 The International Biogeography Society