Temporal and spatial comparisons of angiosperm diversity between eastern Asia and North America

作者：Haihua Hu, Jianfei Ye, Bing Liu, Lingfeng Mao, Stephen A. Smith, Russell L. Barrett, Pamela S. Soltis, Douglas E. Soltis, Zhiduan Chen, Limin Lu · 发表于：National Science Review · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1093/nsr/nwab199 · 被引用次数：24 · 研究领域：Plant Diversity and Evolution、Plant and Fungal Species Descriptions、Plant and animal studies

Comparative approaches that examine floras with similar environments, but different diversity patterns, provide good opportunities to elucidate how uneven distributions of biodiversity were assembled. Eastern Asia (EA) and North America north of Mexico (NA; see definitions of EA and NA in Fig. S1A) share similar geographical environments with comparable latitude, land area and climate, except that NA has a coastline in the west. The two regions harbor more than 12% of all angiosperm species in the world [1,2] and cover six biodiversity hotspots (Fig. S1A) [3]. However, the number of vascular plant species in EA is at least 1.5 times larger than in NA [1,2]. Detailed comparative study of the floras in EA and NA therefore affords an ideal test case for exploring processes that contribute to this highly uneven distribution of plant diversity. Much of the earlier work focused on comparing taxonomic diversity between eastern EA and eastern NA. However, recent studies have suggested phylogenetic diversity, which incorporates both taxonomic diversity and evolutionary histories of taxa, to be a better measure of biodiversity than only counting and comparing species number [4]. One recent study detected significantly higher species richness and phylogenetic diversity in eastern EA than eastern NA [5]. However, few studies have assessed the phylogenetic diversity patterns between the floras of EA and NA, involving both their eastern and western areas (Fig. S1A). Western parts of EA and...