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Evolution

Geology and climate drive diversification

Nature volume 509, pages 297–298 (2014)Cite this article

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Data from the Galapagos Islands exemplify how geology and climate can interact to cause episodes of isolation and fusion of the biota across a landscape. Different scales of such cycles dictate varying mechanisms of species generation.

Writing in the Journal of Biogeography, Ali and Aitchison1 examine geological and climatic events over the past 700,000 years, namely island ontogeny and shifting sea levels, and their effects on biodiversity in the Galapagos Islands. The authors propose a process that can be considered a general evolutionary mechanism: that the dynamics of isolation caused by geological and climatological processes plays a fundamental part in shaping diversity. Whether these processes promote or constrain species diversification, however, depends on the spatial (global, regional or local) and temporal (multimillion, multimillennial or multidecadal) scales and periodicity of isolation and coalescence.

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Figure 1: Isolation across scales of space and time.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rosemary G. Gillespie and George K. Roderick are in the Department of Environmental Science and the Berkeley Natural History Museums, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720-3114, USA.,

    Rosemary G. Gillespie & George K. Roderick

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  1. Rosemary G. Gillespie
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  2. George K. Roderick
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Correspondence to Rosemary G. Gillespie or George K. Roderick.

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Gillespie, R., Roderick, G. Geology and climate drive diversification. Nature 509, 297–298 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/509297a

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