Biogeography is the scientific study of the spatial and temporal patterns of biodiversity, examining how and why the distributions of species, populations, communities, and ecosystems vary across geographical areas and through evolutionary time. It integrates principles from ecology, evolution, geology, and climatology to analyze processes such as dispersal, speciation, extinction, vicariance, and range shifts. Biogeography encompasses subfields including historical biogeography, which reconstructs past distributions using phylogenetic and paleontological data, and ecological biogeography, which investigates how current environmental gradients, habitat structure, and biotic interactions shape present-day distributional patterns and biodiversity gradients, such as latitudinal diversity clines and island faunas.
Where are the great marine animals of the Mediterranean, such as the fin whale, the sperm whale or the bottlenose dolphin? How does their distribution change over a few weeks? All indications suggest that these species shift ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 30, 2026
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13
Where did the roughly 100 species of New World blackbirds alive today originate, and how did they spread across the Americas? Dr. Axel Arango Garcia and professor Chaitanya S. Gokhale from the Chair for Computational and ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 30, 2026
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9
As a deadly fungal disease ravages wild frog populations around the globe, scientists have identified potential locations in Panama where amphibians might persist despite the disease, according to new research from the Smithsonian's ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 30, 2026
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12
Tropical forests may look like a uniform sea of green from above, but new research shows that carefully measured differences in forest structure and function can help explain how birds use existing habitats, how they respond ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 25, 2026
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40
The flora of the Alps is changing: Species are moving to higher elevations, new plants are appearing and others are disappearing.
Ecology
Sep 24, 2026
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13
New analyses of ancient cattle, sheep and goat bones on Madagascar suggest the rapid spread of introduced livestock on the island 1,200 years ago coincided with forest loss and population declines of large native herbivores.
Ecology
Sep 24, 2026
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86
By comparing variations in the coat colors of eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) in Montreal city parks, researchers found that hyperlocal conditions appear to play a bigger role in shaping wildlife traits than ...
Evolution
Sep 24, 2026
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288
Soils harbor some of the most diverse life on Earth. Soil nematodes play crucial roles in maintaining ecosystem functions. Yet how their diversity changes across large landscapes, and what drives those changes, remains poorly ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 23, 2026
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18
New research from the University of St Andrews has created the largest combined study of bat genomes and fossils ever undertaken, finding that bats most likely originated in Europe around 65 million years ago before spreading ...
Evolution
Sep 23, 2026
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89
Ask any zoo-goer and they will tell you that capybaras are adorable. Ask a scientist specializing in the rodents, which resemble oversized guinea pigs, and they will tell you they are obligate semiaquatic herbivores that ...
Ecology
Sep 17, 2026
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