The rise of the Himalaya enforced the diversification of SE Asian ferns by altering the monsoon regimes

BMC Plant Biology

Research Article

Qiao-Ping Xiang¹  Xian-Chun Zhang¹  Li Wang¹  Harald Schneider² 

[1] State Key Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100093, Beijing, China;State Key Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100093, Beijing, China;Department of Botany, The Natural History Museum London, SW7 5BD, London, UK;

关键词: Diversification pattern;    East Asian monsoon;    Himalaya;    LASER;    Lepisorus;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2229-12-210

 received in 2012-07-24, accepted in 2012-11-06,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe rise of high mountain chains is widely seen as one of the factors driving rapid diversification of land plants and the formation of biodiversity hotspots. Supporting evidence was reported for the impact of the rapid rise of the Andean mountains but this hypothesis has so far been less explored for the impact of the “roof of the world”. The formation of the Himalaya, and especially the rise of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau in the recent 20 million years, altered the monsoon regimes that dominate the current climates of South East Asia. Here, we infer the hypothesis that the rise of Himalaya had a strong impact on the plant diversity in the biodiversity hotspot of the Southwest Chinese Mountains.ResultsOur analyses of the diversification pattern of the derived fern genus Lepisorus recovered evidence for changes in plant diversity that correlated with the strengthening of South East Asian monsoon. Southwest China or Southwest China and Japan was recovered as the putative area of origin of Lepisorus and enhancing monsoon regime were found to shape the early diversification of the genus as well as subsequent radiations during the late Miocene and Pliocene.ConclusionsWe report new evidence for a coincidence of plant diversification and changes of the climate caused by the uplift of the Himalaya. These results are discussed in the context of the impact of incomplete taxon sampling, uncertainty of divergence time estimates, and limitations of current methods used to assess diversification rates.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Wang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.