Introduction

Biogeography is both a biological and a geographical science. Its ‘field of study’ is the biologically inhabited part of the lithosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere—or, as it has become known—the biosphere. In both biological and geographical literature attention has been primarily concerned with the study of plant rather than animal geography. Biogeography is firmly rooted in the biological sciences on whose data, concepts and methods the geographer must draw and whose developments have inevitably influenced his particular interest in, and approach to, the biosphere. The geographer’s, as distinct from the ecologist’s, approach to biogeography early became and indeed tended to remain until relatively synonymous with the study of the relationships between types of world vegetation, climatic regimes and major soil types. In the 1950s and 1960s biogeographical research was primarily focused on large- scale vegetation mapping and Quaternary ecology.