Institute for Biodiversity and Environmental Research is pleased to invite you to the IBER Seminar Series: GLOBAL BIOGEOGRAPHY: REVISITING THE CLASSICS By Associate Professor Dr Serban Proches Date: Wednesday, 25th September 2013 Time: 2:30 pm Venue: FSM 2.18, Faculty of Science Building All are welcome! Abstract: Biogeography is currently dominated by modern topics such as conservation planning and bioclimatic niche modeling, both highly relevant to present threats to biodiversity such as climate change and habitat destruction. Nevertheless, in order to make biogeography accessible and popular at school and undergraduate level, there are fundamental questions which need to be addressed first. Such questions were initially answered intuitively by biogeography’s forefathers, but can now be approached again with better data and methods. This talk focuses on testing the validity of three such concepts that have either been ignored or contested in recent years: (1) Gondwanan versus Laurasian distributions, (2) global regionalisation, and (3) cosmopolitan distributions. The existence of Gondwanan distributions has been contested recently, but the analysis of two global data sets suggests that this concept needs to be resurrected in a present-day context, though possibly freed from the vicariance implications initially associated with it. Global regions were initially (19th century) the core of biogeographical thinking and, after some semi-quantitative approaches from the 1950s to the 1970s, were mostly forgotten in the 1980s and 1990s. Renewed efforts show that the early schemata were mostly correct, but help qualify some of the differences between such approaches based on the methods used – often with a special focus of South-East Asia. Cosmopolitan distributions have been long forgotten, but phylogenetic data can help redefine what a cosmopolitan lineage is, and also identify world’s regions where cosmopolitan regions originate. In the case of tetrapod vertebrate, two such regions stand out: Africa and South-east Asia. Many other such topics still await modern approaches. Speaker’s Profile Şerban Procheş is originally from Romania, and completed his PhD and several postdoctoral projects at various South African universities, looking at topics such as plant and animal species diversity and endemism patterns, phylogenetic diversity measurement, invasion biology, and plant-insect interactions. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Biogeography at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is spending his very first sabbatical at UBD, looking at the filtering of ancient lineages by environmental factors, in collaboration with Prof. David Marshall and Dr. Rahayu Sukri. Thank you. For further information, please contact Tel: +673-246-3001 (ext. 1376) Email: [email protected]
Posted on: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 03:11:13 +0000
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