editorial ISSN 1948‐6596 On why we should teach biogeography and the need for a bio‐ geography compendium Before I started working as a PhD student I never realized that there was a field called biogeogra‐ phy. I had never travelled very far, at least not with a keen eye for my biological surroundings. Also, I never really asked myself whether or not all species that occurred around my city of birth had always been there. My view of the world in terms of biodiversity, as with so many other people, was rather stable. I was furthermore used to the spe‐ cies‐poor environment that The Netherlands are, in comparison to many other parts of the world. When I started my work at the plant sys‐ tematics group where I did my PhD research in 2000, this world view radically changed. I started working on Guatteria (Annonaceae) a species‐rich genus of Neotropical understorey trees. The distri‐ butions of these trees range from narrow endem‐ ics (or even only known from a single collection; see for instance Erkens et al. 2008) to a species that occurs from south‐eastern Brazil up to Hon‐ duras. The latter species looks extremely similar across its wide distributional range, while other species exhibit tremendous morphological diver‐ sity in, for instance, leaf size (with mature leaves ranging from 40x15 cm on one side of the distri‐ butional range to 13x4 cm at the other end). I must admit that these differences were very scary for me as a staring PhD student (and frankly, sometimes still are). On the other hand, these dif‐ ferences also fascinated me. I began asking ques‐ tions like: “why are these species distributed in the way they are?”, “have these species always been distributed in the same way?”, and “where have all these species originated?” It was only then that I realized I was asking biogeographical questions. So how could I have missed out on such an apparently important topic as biogeography dur‐ ing my studies? Biogeography was completely lacking as a discipline from my university curricu‐ lum, as was probably the case at that time in many universities. Reading back, I see that bio‐ geography as a discipline was not perceived as a mature and independent scientific field in those days (Nelson 1978, Crisci et al. 2003). In my own experience, biogeography was hidden as a sub‐ discipline in, for instance, evolutionary biology or systematic biology courses and students were only brought into contact with the “patterns of biodiversity” as though they were static and un‐ changeable. Fortunately, today biogeography is blooming more than ever, with an increase in pub‐ lications over the last decade (e.g., Posadas et al. The task of answering the sorts of bio‐ geographic questions posed above is quite daunt‐ ing, especially for the Neotropical system I am working on. For example, an estimated 4.3 × 10 11 trees (with diameter at breast height >10 cm) oc‐ cur solely in the Amazon Basin, predicting c. 12,500 woody tree species in the Amazon alone (Hubbell et al. 2008). These trees are part of the enormous diversity of the Neotropics as a whole, where c. 30% of all world‐wide plant diversity oc‐ curs (Thomas 1999), more than on any other con‐ tinental land mass. The Neotropical rainforest contains three species‐rich blocks: the Amazon, the Brazilian Atlantic Coastal forest and the area comprising Central America and the pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador. Of these, the latter two were labelled as biodiversity hotspots because of the exceptional concentrations of species re‐ stricted to those areas combined with the excep‐ tional loss of habitat these areas are undergoing (Myers et al. 2000). Needless to say, these species ‐rich blocks are focal points for conservation and hundreds of millions of Euros have been spent on their protection (Halpern et al. 2006). Unfortu‐ nately, mechanisms behind this extraordinary di‐ versity remain a controversial issue in biogeogra‐ phy and ecology. Yet, it is essential to understand these mechanisms if we are to safeguard the fu‐ ture of this biodiversity through conservation (Purvis et al. 2005). We need to generate more basic data on the distributions and ecologies of tens of thousands of plant species, in combination with more directed studies and large‐scale experi‐ mental manipulations, in order to address these frontiers of biogeography 5.2, 2013 — © 2013 the authors; journal compilation © 2013 The International Biogeography Society