G.F. Guala
to see where
Florida has been over the last 360 million years.
(this file takes
a long time to load but it is neat)
Remember also that centers of diversity have little relationship to
centers of endemism.
Sampling errors are also a huge problem when determining either
For example in:
Prance, G.T. (Ed.). 1982. Biological Diversification in
the Tropics: Proceedings of the Fifth International
Symposium of the Association for Tropical Biology,
Held at Macuto Beach, Caracas, Venezuela, February
8-13, 1979. Columbia University Press, New York.
multiple centers of diversity were described in the Amazon and proposed
as refugia. Closer observation of the data has shown it to be dubious
at best because 1. highly sampled areas also showed up as highly diverse
and 2. areas for different groups did not significantly overlap when corrected
for sampling. We will discuss this more in class. Trends in diversity
associated with the E/W moisture gradient and elevation (although less
so) are clear though.