ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly characterizes evolutionary biogeography and explains its steps. Evolutionary biogeography integrates distributional, phylogenetic, molecular and paleontological data to discover biogeographical patterns exhibited by plant and animal taxa and to assess the historical changes that have shaped biotic assembly. Biotas are sets of spatio-temporally integrated plant and animal taxa that coexist in given areas. The identification of these sets of taxa constitutes the first step of an evolutionary biogeographical analysis. Cladistic biogeography is an approach based on the correspondence between the phylogenetic relationships of different plant and animal taxa and the relationships between the areas that they inhabit. As the geographical distributions of taxa have limits and these limits repeat for different taxa, they allow the recognition of biotas, which are graphically represented as areas of endemism. Cenocrons are sets of taxa that share the same biogeographical history, constituting identifiable subsets within a biota by their common biotic origin and evolutionary history.
