1. School of Botany and Zoology, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200, Australia
2. Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, University of Chile, Casilla 653, Santiago, Chile
3. School of Integrative Biology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia
4. L. H. Bailey Hortorium, Department of Plant Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA
5. School of Plant Science, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 55, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia
6. Landcare Research, PO Box 40, Lincoln 7640, New Zealand
7. National Herbarium of New South Wales, Mrs Macquaries Road, Sydney, New South Wales 2000, Australia
8. Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales 2109, Australia
9. Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA
10. Institute of Systematic Botany, University of Zurich, Zurich 8008, Switzerland

Correspondence to: Michael D. Crisp¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to M.D.C. (Email: mike.crisp@anu.edu.au).

Abstract

How and why organisms are distributed as they are has long intrigued evolutionary biologists^{1, 2, 3, 4}. The tendency for species to retain their ancestral ecology has been demonstrated in distributions on local and regional scales^{5, 6, 7}, but the extent of ecological conservatism over tens of millions of years and across continents has not been assessed^{8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13}. Here we show that biome stasis at speciation has outweighed biome shifts by a ratio of more than 25:1, by inferring ancestral biomes for an ecologically diverse sample of more than 11,000 plant species from around the Southern Hemisphere. Stasis was also prevalent in transocean colonizations. Availability of a suitable biome could have substantially influenced which lineages establish on more than one landmass, in addition to the influence of the rarity of the dispersal events themselves. Conversely, the taxonomic composition of biomes has probably been strongly influenced by the rarity of species' transitions between biomes. This study has implications for the future because if clades have inherently limited capacity to shift biomes¹³, then their evolutionary potential could be strongly compromised by biome contraction as climate changes.

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