Vicariance Biogeography

Abstract

Vicariance biogeography emerged in the late 1970s from distinct traditions in historical biogeography: the phylogenetic systematics and the panbiogeography. Vicariance biogeography, in the strict sense, is the study of repeated patterns of disjunct distributions within many members of a biota that may be explained by vicariance (or splitting of areas). Since its origin to the 1990s, it became the most important method or discipline within historical biogeography, involving the study of life and Earth history using cladistic methods (cladistic biogeography). In fact, nowadays both names (vicariance and cladistic biogeography) are frequently treated as synonyms. Vicariance biogeography became a very important method to classify areas of endemism on a global, regional, and local scale in terms of their historical relationships. Since the late 1990s this method or discipline has been in disuse because of many inherent problems when there is not congruence between geography and the phylogenetic tree of the species (ie, sympatric speciation, species extinction or dispersal). The development of molecular phylogenetics and its approaches to infer ancestral areas and times of diversification has displaced the use of cladistics biogeography and/or vicariance biogeography.