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Species distribution, or species dispersion, [1] is the manner in which a biological taxon is spatially arranged. [2] The geographic limits of a particular taxon's distribution is its range , often represented as shaded areas on a map.
Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time.Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, isolation and habitat area. [1]
Combined with the well-established geological theory of plate tectonics, common descent provides a way to combine facts about the current distribution of species with evidence from the fossil record to provide a logically consistent explanation of how the distribution of living organisms has changed over time.
Insects make up the vast majority of animal species. [14]Chapman, 2005 and 2009 [9] has attempted to compile perhaps the most comprehensive recent statistics on numbers of extant species, drawing on a range of published and unpublished sources, and has come up with a figure of approximately 1.9 million estimated described taxa, as against possibly a total of between 11 and 12 million ...
Distribution of living terrestrial vertebrate species, highest concentration of diversity shown in red in equatorial regions, declining polewards (towards the blue end of the spectrum) Biodiversity is not evenly distributed, rather it varies greatly across the globe as well as within regions and seasons.
Spatial ecology studies the ultimate distributional or spatial unit occupied by a species.In a particular habitat shared by several species, each of the species is usually confined to its own microhabitat or spatial niche because two species in the same general territory cannot usually occupy the same ecological niche for any significant length of time.
In some cases, geographical range limits are entirely predictable, such as the physical barrier of an ocean for a terrestrial species. [1] In other cases the specific reasons why species do not pass these boundaries are unknown, however, ecology is the main determinant of the distribution of a species. [2]
Phytogeography is concerned with all aspects of plant distribution, from the controls on the distribution of individual species ranges (at both large and small scales, see species distribution) to the factors that govern the composition of entire communities and floras. Geobotany, by contrast, focuses on the geographic space's influence on plants.