The Biogeography of Amphibians and Reptiles

This chapter focuses on the biogeography of amphibians and reptiles. Biogeography combines information about natural history, phylogeny, geology, and climate to interpret the past and present distributions of taxa. It describes patterns of occurrence to understand the forces that create and maintain them. Two mechanisms—dispersal and vicariance—are responsible for the geographic distribution of organisms. Organisms move via dispersal to their present locations, by walking, swimming, flying, drifting, or being transported by another organism (often humans). Vicariance occurs when a new barrier fragments what had been a continuous geographic distribution of organisms into two or more discontinuous distributions. The chapter then considers phylogeography and island biogeography.