Evolution of Tropical Biodiversity Hotspots
For decades, scientists have worked to understand the intricacies of biological diversity – from genetic and species diversity to ecological diversity.
As scientists began to understand the depths of diversity across the planet, they noticed an interesting pattern. The number of species increases drastically from the Poles to the Equator. This phenomenon, known as the latitudinal gradient of species diversity, has helped define the tropics as home to most of the world’s biodiversity. From plants and insects to birds, amphibians, and mammals, scientists estimate that tropical forests contain more than half the species on Earth.
These biologically rich areas are known as biodiversity hotspots. To qualify as a hotspot, a region must have at least 1,500 vascular plants species occurring nowhere else and have 30 percent or less of its original natural vegetation. In other words, biodiversity hotspots must be irreplaceable, but also threatened.
While scientists agree that most biological diversity originated in the tropics, the jury is still out on how tropical species diversity formed and how it is maintained. A new study published in Science addresses these long-standing questions.
In “The evolution of tropical biodiversity hotspots,” researchers argue that tropical species form faster in harsh, species-poor areas, but accumulate in climatically moderate areas to form hotspots of species diversity. Drawing on decades of expeditions and research in the tropics and the scientists’ own knowledge and sampling of tropical bird diversity, they assembled a large and complete phylogenomic dataset for a detailed investigation of tropical diversification.
“This is our magnum opus,” said Elizabeth Derryberry, associate professor in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and a senior author of the study. “This research is the product of a decades-long international collaboration to produce a completely sampled evolutionary history of a massive tropical radiation – the 1,306 species of suboscine passerine birds.”
Roughly one in three Neotropical bird species is a suboscine, making it the predominant avian group in Neotropic terrestrial habitats – from the Andes snow line to the Amazon lowlands – and the perfect group to examine the origins of tropical biodiversity.
“The tropics are a natural laboratory for speciation research,” said Michael Harvey, recent EEB postdoc and lead author of the study. “Many high-profile studies over the years sought answers to fundamental questions concerning species formation and maintenance, but even the best of these studies sampled only a minority of the existing species within the clade in question.”
In addition, nearly all of the previous studies used highly incomplete data matrices and supertree analyses, which left results open to large estimation errors in downstream analysis, according to Derryberry.
For this study, Derryberry, Harvey, EEB Professor Brian O’Meara, and fellow researchers used a time-calibrated phylogenomic tree to provide information needed for estimating the dynamics of suboscine diversification across time, lineages, and geography. They also used the tree to test links between the dynamics and potential drivers of tropical diversity.
“We took no shortcuts in this study,” Derryberry said. “We leveraged this unparalleled sampling of tropical diversity to illustrate the tempo and geography of evolution in the tropics. It is the first study to demonstrate conclusively that tropical biodiversity hotspots are linked to climates that are both moderate and stable.”
The team discovered species-rich regions in the tropics contain diversity accumulated during a protracted evolutionary period and are not just a locus of young diversity. A key result of their study is that the best predictor of elevated speciation rates in New World suboscines is low species diversity. In other words, new species form at higher rates in areas containing relatively few species.
“The qualities that nurture diversity, lower extinction, and promote the gradual accumulation of species are, paradoxically, not the ones that support biodiversity hotspots,” Harvey said. “The hotspots are seeded by species born outside the hotspot in areas characterized by more extreme and less climatically stable climates.”
The team discovered that, overall, extreme environments limit species diversity, but increase opportunities for populations to evolve to become distinct species. Moderate climates, on the other hand, limit speciation, but provide more opportunities for species diversity to accumulate.
“Our study is the first to be able to address tropical diversification with a large, comprehensively sampled clade and will pave the way for future investigations of evolution in the world’s diversity hotspots,” Derryberry said.
The international collaboration for this study included researchers from Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela, as well as ornithologists from groups underrepresented in the sciences, include Latinx and women researchers.
“This paper marks not only a change in our understanding of evolution in the tropics, but also in acknowledgement and valuation of the diversity of culture, expertise, and perspective in the field of ornithology,” Derryberry said.
The US National Science Foundation, Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development, and the São Paulo Research Foundation funded the study.
She has been one of the leading scientists in the field of animal behavior for decades, and a role model for generations of young researchers. Her work with K-12 schools in Tennessee has touched thousands of students over the last 20 years, instilling a passion for biology and for the scientific process. And, as she says, in the 1970s, she helped stopped a war from occurring between two Central American countries.