Landscape Ecol DOI 10.1007/s10980-011-9598-y

BOOK REVIEW

Understanding the distribution of life on Earth in an age of phylogenetic systematics L. R. Parenti and M. C. Ebach, Comparative biogeography: discovering and classifying biogeographical patterns of a dynamic Earth. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2009, 295 pp. illus., maps. Cloth, ISBN 978-0-520-25945-4, US$50 Matt Fitzpatrick Received: 26 January 2011 / Accepted: 3 March 2011 ! Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

If you ask the older generation of landscape ecologists and biogeographers what similarities their fields share, I would wager most would mention the theory of island biogeography and its application to understanding the effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity. Indeed, MacArthur and Wilson (1967) theory to explain the number of species on an island as a function of its size and isolation arguably served as the developmental basis for much of landscape ecology. Some might also mention an inability of both fields to experiment in the classical sense; landscape ecology because of the inherent uniqueness and isolation of landscapes in space, biogeography because of remoteness in time. If you posed the same question to the new generation of landscape ecologists and biogeographers, many likely would mention the transformative impact molecular methods (e.g., phylogenetics, landscape genetics, etc.) are having on both fields and how these tools are shedding light on both old and new questions that attempt to infer process from pattern. The goal of Parenti and Ebach’s book is not so much to revisit long-standing questions in biogeography, but mostly to harness the power of emerging molecular tools to establish a new framework for exploring biogeographical patterns and to infer their associated processes. Their framework, which they M. Fitzpatrick (&) University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Appalachian Lab, Frostburg, MD 21532, USA e-mail: [email protected]

call comparative biogeography, aims to integrate the apparently fragmented fields of systematic biogeography (classification and description of pattern) and evolutionary biogeography (explanation of processes and identification of mechanisms) into a single, overarching theme. The central premise of their framework is that hierarchical phylogenetic relationships of taxa can be used to understand biotic relationships among local and global biogeographic regions to ask: What explains species distributions and patterns of diversity? The book is divided into ten chapters that are organized into three parts: History and Homology; Methods; and Implementation. The first section, three chapters in length, provides the background and foundations of comparative biogeography and its relationship to other, closely aligned fields (as well as a fair amount of history). These chapters stress the importance of endemism as a key principle for inferring the processes responsible for biogeographic patterns. The second part deals with methods and encompasses three chapters, the first of which might more appropriately be categorized as under ‘‘Explanatory Models’’ rather than methods per se. The remaining two chapters in this section detail a laundry list of systematic and evolutionary biogeographic methods. Part three begins with a seemingly out of place, 15-page detour on geology and fossilization, before moving on to a case study in which they implement their comparative biogeography framework. The final chapter in this section and the

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book, titled ‘‘The Future of Biogeography’’, argues for greater integration of the field through the recognition that biogeographers should be united by the areas they study rather than divided by differences in methodological approaches or taxonomic focus. They end with a call for levels of attention and funding afforded other ‘‘large-scale, global scientific efforts’’. It is unclear to me whether this book will achieve the authors’ goal of uniting disparate subfields of biogeography into one happy Pangea of disciplines or not—or whether their work will even nudge the field forward, for that matter. What is clear is that Parenti and Ebach are excited by the prospect of doing so. They should be commended for their attempt to cut two Gordian knots and then to cleanly braid their ends back together into a connected whole. Make no mistake, this is a book written for biogeographers by biogeographers, and in particular, biogeographers with more of an evolutionary bent rather than an ecological focus with which landscape ecologists might feel more aligned. I found the use of jargon overwhelming and the glossary often of little help. For example, the definition for ‘‘Area of Endemism’’ (which is not the same as an Endemic Area, by the way) is ‘‘an area characterized by the

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overlapping distributions of two or more taxa’’. In my mind, almost any place on the planet fits this definition. If you hope to wade through this book, first re-familiarize yourself with the definitions for areagram, geographic paralogy, and nested polytomies, to name a few. Perhaps the greatest shortcoming of the book is that Parenti and Ebach speak the obscure language of cladistic biogeographers and seemingly nothing else. For these reasons, the examples and case studies were hardly illuminating. Although this book may one day make a useful contribution to biogeography, clearly it was not the authors’ intention to do the same for landscape ecology. Unless you want to impress your friends at the next IALE meeting by throwing around your knowledge of paralogy-free subtree analysis, this book will offer little in terms of practical use for most landscape ecologists.

Reference MacArthur RH, Wilson EO (1967) The theory of island biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton