Biogeography
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities vary in a highly regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, isolation and habitat area.
Knowledge of spatial variation in the numbers and types of organisms is as vital to us today as it was to our early human ancestors, as we adapt to heterogeneous but geographically predictable environments. Biogeography is an integrative field of inquiry that unites concepts and information from ecology, evolutionary biology, geology, and physical geography.
Modern biogeographic research combines information and ideas from many fields, from the physiological and ecological constraints on organismal dispersal to geological and climatological phenomena operating at global spatial scales and evolutionary time frames.
See also
- The Theory of Island Biogeography
- Bibliography of biology
- Biome (biogeographic realm)
- Continental drift
- Distance decay
- Charles Darwin
- Ecological land classification
- Ecology
- Landscape ecology
- Macroecology
- Phylogeography
- Floristic province
- Phytochorion - Floristic region
- Sky island
- Systematic and evolutionary biogeography association
- Tectonic plates
- Miklos Udvardy
- Alfred Russel Wallace
- Max Carl Wilhelm Weber
- Zoogeography
