Tropical Africa is home to an astonishing biodiversity occurring in a variety of ecosystems.
Past climatic change and geological events have impacted the evolution and diversification …

Recent studies have generated an explosion of phylogenetic and biogeographic data and
have provided new tools to investigate the processes driving large-scale gradients in …

INTRODUCTION Individual processes that shape geographical patterns of biodiversity are
increasingly understood, but their complex interactions on broad spatial and temporal scales …

Background Taxonomy is the biological discipline that identifies, describes, classifies and
names extant and extinct species and other taxa. Nowadays, species taxonomy is …

Precise characterization of hydroclimate variability in Amazonia on various timescales is
critical to understanding the link between climate change and biodiversity. Here we present …

An appreciation of the scale and frequency of climatic oscillations in the past few million
years is modifying our views on how evolution proceeds. Such major events caused …

The S outh A merican continent is composed of several biogeographical regions harbouring
the highest biodiversity on the globe, encompassing five of the world's biodiversity 'hot …

A latitudinal gradient in biodiversity has existed since before the time of the dinosaurs, yet
how and why this gradient arose remains unresolved. Here we review two major hypotheses …

The fish faunas of continental South and Central America constitute one of the greatest
concentrations of aquatic diversity on Earth, consisting of about 10 percent of all living …

Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain high species diversity in Amazonia, but
few generalizations have emerged. In part, this has arisen from the scarcity of rigorous tests …