ABSTRACT

This detailed exposition gives background and context to how modern biogeography has got to where it is now. For biogeographers and other researchers interested in biodiversity and the evolution of life on islands, Biogeology: Evolution in a Changing Landscape provides an overview of a large swathe of the globe encompassing Wallacea and the western Pacific. The book contains the full text of the original article explored in each chapter, presented as it appeared on publication.

Key features:

  • Holistic treatment, collecting together a series of important biogeographical papers into a single volume
  • Authored by an expert who has spent nearly three decades actively involved in biogeography
  • Describes and interprets a region of exceptional biodiversity and extreme endemism
  • The only book to provide an integrated treatment of Wallacea, Melanesia, New Zealand, the New Zealand Subantarctic Islands and Antarctica
  • Offers a critique of fashionable neo-dispersalist arguments, showing how these still suffer from the same weaknesses of the original Darwinian formulation.

The chapters also include analysis of many major theoretical and philosophical issues of modern biogeographic theory, so that those interested in a more philosophical approach will find the book stimulating and thought-provoking.

chapter chapter one|18 pages

Setting the scene

chapter chapter two|22 pages

Flesh and rocks evolve together

chapter chapter three|27 pages

Cleopatra’s nose

chapter chapter four|30 pages

New Guinea revisited

chapter chapter five|35 pages

The Malay Archipelago

chapter chapter six|30 pages

The furious fifties

chapter chapter seven|29 pages

The Great South Land

chapter chapter eight|32 pages

Natural areas

chapter chapter nine|19 pages

The final piece of the jigsaw puzzle

chapter chapter ten|11 pages

Synthesis