Why Do Tropical Mountains Support Exceptionally High Biodiversity? The Eastern Arc Mountains and the Drivers of Saintpaulia Diversity

We combine information about the evolutionary history and distributional patterns of the genus Saintpaulia H. Wendl. (Gesneriaceae; ‘African violets’) to elucidate the factors and processes behind the accumulation of species in tropical montane areas of high biodiversity concentration. We find that high levels of biodiversity in the Eastern Arc Mountains are the result of pre-Quaternary speciation processes and environmental stability. Our results support the hypothesis that climatically stable mountaintops may have acted as climatic refugia for lowland lineages during the Pleistocene by preventing extinctions. In addition, we found evidence for the existence of lowland micro-refugia during the Pleistocene, which may explain the high species diversity of East African coastal forests. We discuss the conservation implications of the results in the context of future climate change.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2012-11-19

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0048908PMID 23185283PMCID 3501504
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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