Mark Lomolino

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• Ph.D.
• Professor Emeritus at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry

Modern biogeography now encompasses an impressive diversity of patterns and phenomena of the geography of nature, providing insights fundamental to understanding the forces influencing the spatial and temporal dynamics of biological diversity. However, rather than praise our discipline for its great breadth of visions, our purpose here is to point...

Aim To assess the relative contributions of colonization, speciation and human activities on species richness ( S ) of mammalian communities among oceanic islands. Location Palaeo‐islands world‐wide. Methods We compiled species lists from published works and compared species–area and species–isolation relationships for mammalian taxa of 36 island...

I describe the set of fundamental principles of biogeography that can serve as an integrative, conceptual framework for unifying and advancing our abilities to explain the geography of life – generally. I assert that patterns of variation of biotas among regions and across geographic gradients result from the very regular patterns of variation in e...

As one moves from the core to the periphery of a species' geographical range, populations occupy less favourable habitats and exhibit lower and more variable densities. Populations along the periphery of the range tend to be more fragmented and, as a result, are less likely to receive immigrants from other populations. A population's probability of...

This chapter looks into the distribution and dynamics of ecological communities, biomes, and ecosystems. It provides an overview of communities and ecosystems, which are the highest levels of biotic and ecological organization. Compositional and functional approaches to mapping communities include the study of phytosociology and the notion of evolu...

This chapter focuses on island biogeography. It shows how islands have always had a great influence on ecology, evolution, and biogeography. For mainland systems, the diversity of insular biotas is often simply characterized by their species richness, which refers to the number of species of a particular taxon. The chapter then looks at the pattern...

This chapter presents the history and reticulating phylogeny of biogeography from the 18th century. The developmental history of biogeography presents a story of increasing diversification often accompanied by the isolation and specialization of its descendant disciplines. Populations of humans have over time accumulated knowledge of geographic var...

This chapter presents the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of lineages. It provides an overview of the basic principles of phylogenetic systematics and the role of fossils in biogeography. Phylogeography refers to an approach that studies the geographic distributions of genealogical lineages within species and among closely related specie...

This chapter provides an overview of geographical changes on Earth. Plate tectonics theory provides a framework for understanding Earth's landmasses and ocean basins, which has provided crucial advances in the understanding of biogeographic science. Earth system dynamics have driven countless episodes of biotic responses of speciation, dispersal, a...

This chapter explores the geography of diversification and regionalization. It explains the fundamental biogeographic patterns that emerge from a history of the dispersal, diversification, and extinction of lineages and biotas. Moreover, the diversity of life on Earth reflects the outcome of opposing forces promoting both convergence and divergence...

This chapter looks into the reconstruction of the geographic history of lineages and biotas. It outlines the development of concepts and shifts of paradigms in historical biogeography. Phylogeography refers to a popular approach that allows the reconstruction of lineage and biotic histories across recent time frames and among populations within spe...

This chapter looks at dispersal and immigration. Dispersal, which refers to the movements of organisms away from their natal range, only influences species distributions and other biogeographic patterns if the result is immigration. All biogeographic patterns result from the combined effects of these responses to environmental variation since popul...

This chapter covers the biogeography of humanity, biological diversity, and conservation biogeography. It discusses the ecogeographic patterns of humans. This revolves around the evolutionary responses of the world's indigenous human populations to varying environmental conditions. Understanding the impacts of humanity on biological diversity provi...

Biogeography , which is in its fifth edition, provides an explanation of how geographic variation across terrestrial and marine environments has influenced the fundamental processes of immigration, extinction, and evolution to shape species distributions and nearly all patterns of biological diversity. This edition builds on the strengths of previo...

This chapter examines the processes of speciation and extinction. It shows that dispersal has highly influenced processes of evolution and extinction. It argues that it has a strong geographic context. If the rate of extinction exceeds the rate of speciation, the group diversity decreases, and all or nearly all of its representatives go extinct. Es...

This chapter discusses the visualization and analysis of biogeographic patterns. The most obvious patterns in the distributions of organisms occur in response to variations in the physical environment, which include variations in climatic, oceanic, and other environmental conditions. Two-dimensional renderings of the geographic templates range from...

This chapter examines the areography, ecogeography, and macroecology of continental and oceanic biotas. The ecological biogeography of continents and ocean basins gives rise to the idea of different species existing among geographic areas and geographic gradients. The chapter also considers geographic variation in the characteristics of individuals...

This chapter reviews the foundations and frontiers of biogeography. It explains that the long and distinguished history of biogeography is tightly interwoven with that of ecology and evolutionary biology. Knowledge of the patterns seen in the geography of nature and causal explanations of the processes responsible for them accumulated and matured i...

This chapter provides an overview of the ecological foundations concerning the distribution of individuals, species, and populations. It explains that each species has a unique geographic range that is central to all biogeography. The limits of geographical ranges include physical limiting factors, disturbance, dispersal, time, and interactions wit...

This chapter discusses the glaciation and biogeographic dynamics of the Pleistocene. It highlights that the climatic upheavals of the Pleistocene caused major shifts in the geography of life across the planet. Earth experienced numerous glacial-interglacial cycles during the Pleistocene, so the cycle of glacial and interglacial periods affected the...

This chapter introduces the science of biogeography. It explains that biogeography is the branch of science that attempts to document and understand spatial patterns of biological diversity. Modern biogeography includes studies of all patterns of geographic variation in nature and elements of biological diversity that vary across geographic gradien...

Human settlement of islands across the Pacific Ocean was followed by waves of faunal extinctions that occurred so rapidly that their dynamics are difficult to reconstruct in space and time. These extinctions included large, wingless birds called moa that were endemic to New Zealand. Here we reconstructed the range and extinction dynamics of six gen...

The extinction of the woolly rhinoceros ( Coelodonta antiquitatis ) at the onset of the Holocene remains an enigma, with conflicting evidence regarding its cause and spatiotemporal dynamics. This partly reflects challenges in determining demographic responses of late Quaternary megafauna to climatic and anthropogenic causal drivers with available g...

Drivers and dynamics of initial human migrations across individual islands and archipelagos are poorly understood, hampering assessments of subsequent modification of island biodiversity. We developed and tested a new statistical-simulation approach for reconstructing the pattern and pace of human migration across islands at high spatiotemporal res...

Mammals play important ecological roles in terrestrial ecosystems, with their particular niches and their impacts on energy flow and nutrient cycling being strongly influenced by one of their most fundamental traits—their body size. Body size influences nearly all of the physiological, behavioral, and ecological traits of mammals, and thus, shifts...

Human settlement of islands across the Pacific Ocean was followed by waves of faunal extinctions that occurred so rapidly that their dynamics are difficult to reconstruct in space and time. These extinctions included large, wingless birds endemic to New Zealand called moa. We reconstructed the range and extinction dynamics of six genetically distin...

An emerging research program on population and geographic range dynamics of Australia's mammals illustrates an approach to better understand and respond to geographic range collapses of threatened wildlife in general. In 1788, Europeans colonized an Australia with a diverse and largely endemic mammal fauna, where many species that are now extinct o...

Islands have long been recognized as distinctive evolutionary arenas leading to morphologically divergent species, such as dwarfs and giants. We assessed how body size evolution in island mammals may have exacerbated their vulnerability, as well as how human arrival has contributed to their past and ongoing extinctions, by integrating data on 1231...

Aim: The drivers and dynamics of initial human migrations across individual islands and archipelagos are poorly understood, affecting assessments of human-modification of island biodiversity. Here, we describe and test a process-explicit approach for reconstructing human arrival and expansion on islands, which combines archaeological and climate re...

Background and Aims The hart’s tongue fern (HTF) complex is a monophyletic group composed of five geographically segregated members with divergent abundance patterns across its broad geographic range. We postulated hierarchical systems of environmental controls in which climatic and land-use change drive abundance patterns at the global scale, whil...

Asplenium scolopendrium is distributed in northern temperate forests with many global biogeographic disjunctions. The species complex of A. scolopendrium has been generated by spatial segregation coupled with divergent evolution. We elucidated the biogeographic history of the A. scolopendrium complex by exploring its origin, dispersal and evolution...

The nine currently recognized species of moa (Order – Dinornithiformes; Bonaparte 1853) suffered extinction soon after New Zealand was settled by humans. They were the result of an evolutionary radiation that produced a unique guild of birds – giant, and totally wingless species that evolved in the absence of non-volant mammals. Recent advances in...

“Macroecology and the geography of micro-evolution” shifts the focus from macroevolutionary patterns in species richness to micro-evolutionary patterns of biogeographic variation within species. These patterns are driven by natural selection and adaptation, which in turn are driven by variation in environmental characteristics among regions and acr...

Evolution occurs not only over time, but across space as well. “Retracing evolution across space and time” explores the sub-discipline of historical biogeography , giving an overview of approaches used to reconstruct the geographic and evolutionary origins of the lineages of natural life forms. Contemporary approaches to mapping these lineages conf...

“Dynamic maps of a dynamic planet” introduces the geographic template —highly regular spatial patterns of variation in environmental conditions across the planet. Despite the regular nature of this geographic template at any given time, Earth is a dynamic planet that has undergone geological upheavals over the last three and a half billion years of...

How are we to comprehend all of nature’s diversity from the cellular level up through all taxonomic, biological, and ecological levels of organization? “The geography of biological diversity” focuses on the measures and meaning of biological diversity, and the general patterns across the principal geographic dimensions (e.g. latitude, area and isol...

Biogeography: A Very Short Introduction explains how our ability to place life in an explicit geographic context is key to understanding our natural world. The geological evolution of Earth has fundamentally influenced its life forms. Biogeography brings together insights from the fields of genetics, geology, paleontology, geography, anthropology,...

Throughout history, insights into understanding the diversity of life forms have come from placing natural phenomena within an explicit geographic context. “Biological diversity and the geography of nature” maps the discoveries of early explorers in the field, from the Age of Enlightenment to the present day. Where do distinct species occur? How an...

“The geographic and ecological advance of humanity” argues that the global expansion of the human species was influenced by the same factors that shaped the expansions of other life forms. Our indigenous populations were also strongly influenced by the forces of natural selection, driving human micro-evolution across the geographic template, such a...

“The geography of diversification” returns to a central theme of biogeography—that place matters, and that each region, down to an island or lake, can be an evolutionary arena, producing its own distinct plant and animal life. Case studies from the Hawaiian Islands, Madagascar, and the Rift Valley Lakes of East Africa illustrate the phenomenon of a...

Aim To assess whether mammalian species introduced onto islands across the globe have evolved to exhibit body size patterns consistent with the ‘island rule,’, and to test an ecological explanation for body size evolution of insular mammals. Location Islands worldwide. Methods We assembled data on body mass, geographical characteristics (latitude...

The island rule describes a graded trend in insular populations of vertebrates from gigantism in small species to dwarfism in large species. The dwarfing of large mammals on islands has been observed both in the present fauna and in the fossil record. Elephants, hippopotami, deer, and other species became dwarfed on islands scattered all over the w...

The geography of biological sound is a largely unexplored topic that exists at the boundary of ecoacoustics and biogeography. Identification and characterization of patterns of biological sound and soundscape variation across the planet may provide insight into the potential for acoustics as a tool for biodiversity monitoring and conservation. Ecoa...

Here we provide an overview of the key empirical discoveries and conceptual advances of the discipline of biogeography, with special emphasis on the development of some of its central ideas from the local knowledge of early civilizations to the globalization of that knowledge, and from the early articulations of its fundamental principles during th...

The physical and biotic environment is often considered the primary driver of functional variation in plant communities. Here, we examine the hypothesis that spatial isolation may also be an important driver of functional variation in plant communities where disturbance and dispersal limitation may prevent species from occupying all suitable habita...

Judging from worldwide patterns, commitment to predator-free island life tends to have significant consequences for the species concerned—for example, marked changes in body size (the island trend). But what would a total lack of ecologically relevant predators have on traits other than body size? For this we evaluated population structure and dyna...

Age-graded fossils of Pleistocene endemic Cretan deer (Candiacervus spp.) reveal unexpectedly high juvenile mortality similar to that reported for extant mainland ruminants, despite the fact that these deer lived in a predator-free environment and became extinct before any plausible date for human arrival. Age profiles show that deer surviving past...

Insular fossil bovids, ranging in age from the latest Miocene to the Holocene, are widely recorded in Asian and Western Mediterranean islands. Several taxa characterized by different levels of endemism, but no species with an entirely identical adaptation, existed on different islands. Even considering that evolutionary processes, affecting size a...

Background/Question/Methods Plant functional traits are an important driver of ecosystem processes and are increasingly used to quantify variation in community functioning. Although many studies have examined how plant functional traits vary across environmental gradients, few have tested how community functioning changes with spatial isolation....

Aim We assessed the generality of the island rule in a database comprising 1593 populations of insular mammals (439 species, including 63 species of fossil mammals), and tested whether observed patterns differed among taxonomic and functional groups. Location Islands world-wide. Methods We measured museum specimens (fossil mammals) and reviewed the...

AimWe investigated the hypothesis that body size evolution of mammals is strongly influenced by ecological interactions, resulting in evolutionary divergence in body size in species‐rich (e.g. mainland) biotas, and convergence on the size of intermediate but absent species in species‐poor (e.g. insular) biotas. LocationMediterranean palaeo‐islands....

This is Appendix S1 to Body size evolution of palaeo-insular mammals: temporal variations and interspecific interactions, as published in Journal of Biogeography, 2013, 40.

Many important issues in conservation biology are more clearly visible on islands than on continental mainlands. This chapter summarizes a few of the key topics that concern island managers worldwide, with exemplary habitat case studies from the islands. The chapter considers primarily the land-breeding vertebrate faunas of islands, but only becaus...

We investigated the hypothesis that body size evolution of mammals is strongly influenced by ecological interactions, resulting in evolutionary divergence in body size in species-rich (e.g. mainland) biotas, and convergence on the size of intermediate but absent species in species-poor (e.g. insular) biotas. Location Mediterranean palaeo-islands. M...

Biogeography has a long and distinguished history, and one inextricably woven into the historical development of evolutionary biology and ecology. Modern biogeography now includes an impressive diversity of patterns, each of which dealing with some aspect of the spatial variation of nature. Given this, few disciplines can be any more relevant to un...

Aim We investigated the hypothesis that the insular body size of mammals results from selective forces whose influence varies with characteristics of the focal islands and the focal species, and with interactions among species (ecological displacement and release). Location Islands world-wide. Methods We assembled data on the geographic characteris...

Biogeographers study all patterns in the geographic variation of life, from the spatial variation in genetic and physiological characteristics of cells and individuals, to the diversity and dynamics of biological communities among continental biotas or across oceanic archipelagoes. The field of island biogeography, in particular, has provided some...

Charles Darwin's observations and insights continue to inspire nearly all scientists who are captivated by both the marvels and the perils of island life. Here I feature four themes inspired by Darwin's singular insights: themes that may continue to provide valuable lessons for understanding the ecological and evolutionary development of insular bi...

We test the hypothesis that the decline of the endangered American burying beetle (Nicrophorus americanus) from over 90% of its original range is the result of habitat loss and fragmentation of eastern North America. Forest removal at a site in southeastern Oklahoma known to have a significant population of N.americanus gave us a unique opportunity...

1 We expanded the island biogeography paradigm to test whether mammalian communities of the heavily fragmented temperate rain forests of the Olympic Peninsula were influenced by local environmental conditions, biogeographic factors (fragment area and isolation) and characteristics of the surrounding landscape. 2 We used live-trapping, sign surveys...

A general review of the patterns of species richness of insular mammals (Lomolino, 1984a) indicated that richness is determined by interactive as well as additive effects of factors affecting immigration and extinction. The present paper reports that species composition of insular mammals is also influenced by such additive and interactive effects....

Body size is perhaps the most important trait of an organism, affecting all of its physiological and ecological processes and, therefore, fundamentally influencing its ability to survive and reproduce in different environments, including those that have been modified by human activities. We tested the hypothesis that anthropogenic transformation of...

We are currently experiencing a resurgence of interest in ecogeographical rules, which describe general trends in morphology and related traits along geographical gradients. In order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the generality and underlying causal mechanisms for these patterns, we recommend a new, more integrated research agend...