Biogeography

The study of where species live and why, combining geography, evolution, and Earth history to explain patterns of distribution across the planet.

Wallace line: The faunal boundary running through the Malay archipelago separating Asian and Australian animal lineages. Alfred Russel Wallace drew this line before drift was accepted; plate tectonics later explained its position.
Dispersal: The movement of organisms away from their birthplace, occasionally crossing oceans and mountain ranges. Long-distance dispersal competes with vicariance as the main explanation for disjunct distributions.
Alexander von Humboldt: The Prussian naturalist whose 1807 essay on vegetation geography founded plant biogeography. He framed vegetation zones by latitude and altitude, making distribution a scientific subject.
Darwin's finches: Thirteen Galápagos finch species descended from a single mainland ancestor, differing mainly in beak form. The classic case of island colonization followed by adaptive radiation.
E. O. Wilson: The Harvard biologist who co-developed island biogeography theory and became a leading conservation advocate. With MacArthur, he turned biogeography into a quantitative, predictive science in 1967.
Gondwana: The southern supercontinent that assembled about 550 million years ago and broke apart during the Jurassic. Its breakup scattered shared ancestries across South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica.
Founder effect: Genetic divergence of a population started by a small number of colonizing individuals. Colonizers of islands carry only a sample of mainland variation, driving rapid divergence.
Alfred Russel Wallace: The naturalist who co-discovered natural selection and wrote The Geographical Distribution of Animals in 1876. He established zoogeographic regions and named the faunal boundary now bearing his name.
Glossopteris: A seed fern genus whose fossils appear across all southern continents and India. Its disjoint fossil range was among Wegener's strongest pieces of evidence for Gondwana.
Robert MacArthur: The ecologist who pioneered mathematical models of population ecology before his early death in 1972. His equilibrium models with Wilson gave biogeography its central quantitative framework.

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