Friday, January 4, 2013

Updated Zoogeographic regions

A cool new paper appeared today in Science by Holt et al (link -  unfortunately behind paywall) where they redefine the zoogeographic areas of the world originally proposed by Wallace in 1876.
Image Credit: Science/AAAS
I particularly like the establishment of the Panamanian area, since many of the taxa I study seem to have a Panamanian distribution. And that brings me to my only problem with this paper: the areas were established using mammals, birds and amphibians. True, they used data from ~21,000 species, which is impressive but arthropods were ignored [the authors claim that data on plants, reptiles and invertebrates are not available, although I am not sure what available means here].

My question is this: are we ever going to see studies of this magnitude using insect data? 

1 comment:

  1. My answer to your question is YES, absolutely, just as soon as we get all insect collections fully digitized!

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