Journal
EVOLUTION
Volume 70, Issue 10, Pages 2171-2185Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/evo.13030
Keywords
Adaptation; biodiversity; extinction; latitude; speciation
Categories
Funding
- Canada Research Chair
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
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The richness of biodiversity in the tropics compared to high-latitude parts of the world forms one of the most globally conspicuous patterns in biology, and yet few hypotheses aim to explain this phenomenon in terms of explicit microevolutionary mechanisms of speciation and extinction. We link population genetic processes of selection and adaptation to speciation and extinction by way of their interaction with environmental factors to drive global scale macroecological patterns. High-latitude regions are both cradle and grave with respect to species diversification. In particular, we point to a conceptual equivalence of environmental harshness and hard selection as eco-evolutionary drivers of local adaptation and ecological speciation. By describing how ecological speciation likely occurs more readily at high latitudes, with such nascent species especially prone to extinction by fusion, we derive the ephemeral ecological speciation hypothesis as an integrative mechanistic explanation for latitudinal gradients in species turnover and the net accumulation of biodiversity.
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