912 TAXON 62 (5) • October 2013: 912–927 Wen & al. • New trends in biogeography 912 Version of Record (identical to print version). INTRODUCTION Biogeography is the study of the distribution of life forms over geographic space and time. Two subdisciplines of bioge- ography have often been recognized: ecological biogeography and historical biogeography (Lieberman, 2003; Crisci, 2006; Lomolino & al., 2010a). New integrative trends in biogeography as well as the utilization of phylogenetics in both subdisci- plines have weakened this dichotomy, nevertheless, this review focuses on the latter, which emphasizes studies on the distri- butional patterns through time at macroevolutionary scales. Biogeography has a long and interesting history, and vari- ous starting points can be selected (Briggs & Humphries, 2004). One can begin with Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who is often recognized as the father of plant biogeography. The publication of his 24-volume work (1805–1837) covering his five years of exploration in South America (1789–1804) ex- cited the public as well as the scientific community in Europe and inspired a whole generation of natural history explorers to travel around the world, including Darwin, Hooker, and Wallace (see below). Charles Darwin’s observations and comparisons (Darwin, 1845) on his five-year around-the-world journey (1831–1836) stimulated his theory about descent with modifications and its mechanisms (Mayr, 1982; Crisci & Katinas, 2009). In fact he dedicated two of the fifteen chapters of the Origin to geographic distributions (chapters 12 and 13, Darwin, 1859). Darwin (1859) also acknowledged the importance of migration from one part of the world to another, the influence of climatic changes, and the many means of dispersal in shaping modern distribution patterns rather than separate creations in the context of plant dis- junctions between eastern Asia and North America (Wen & al., 2010). However, a great deal of the credit for the development of biogeography as a fact-based science should go to Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911), a colleague and friend of Darwin, whose various voyages around the globe such as Antarctica in Biogeography: Where do we go from here? Jun Wen, 1 Richard H. Ree,2 Stefanie M. Ickert-Bond, 3 Zelong Nie4 & Vicki Funk1 1 Department of Botany, National Museum of Natural History, MRC166, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20013-7012, U.S.A. 2 Department of Botany, The Field Museum, 1400 South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60605, U.S.A. 3 UA Museum of the North Herbarium and Department of Biology and Wildlife, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska 99775-6960, U.S.A. 4 Key Laboratory of Biodiversity and Biogeography, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan 650204, P.R. China Author for correspondence: Jun Wen, wenj@si.edu Abstract Biogeography is a multidisciplinary science concerned with how and why organisms are distributed as they are on Earth. It links fields such as systematics, ecology, paleontology, and climatology, and occupies a central position in evolutionary biology, being fundamental to the study of processes such as speciation and adaptive radiation. Here we provide a brief overview of some particularly dynamic areas of inquiry and offer some perspectives on future directions for the field. We hope that some historical debates, such as those over the importance of dispersal, or the validity of molecular dating, are finally being put to rest. Over the last decade, biogeography has become increasingly integrative, and has benefited from advances in statistical methods for inferring geographic range dynamics in a phylogenetic context, molecular estimation of lineage divergence times, and modeling lineage birth and death. These are enabling greater insights into patterns of organismal diversification in time and space. In the next decade, analytical challenges are emerging on several fronts. For example, phylogenies are increasing in size and taxonomic breadth and new sequencing technologies enabling phylogenetic and phylogeographic datasets are increasingly genomic in depth. In addition, geographic occurrence data are accumulating in online repositories, yet tools for data mining and synthetic analysis are lacking for comparative multi-lineage studies. Biogeography is thus entering an era characterized by phylogenomic datasets, increasingly comprehensive sampling of clades, and interdisciplinary synthesis. We anticipate continued progress in our understanding of biodiversity patterns at regional and global scales, but this will likely require greater collabo- ration with specialists in bioinformatics and computational science. Finally, it is clear that biogeography has an increasingly important role to play in the discovery and conservation of biodiversity. Lessons learned from biogeographic studies of islands are being applied to better understand extinction dynamics as continental ecosystems become more fragmented, and phylogeog- raphy and ecological niche modeling offer innovative paths toward the discovery of previously unknown species distributions and priority areas for conservation. The future of biogeography is bright and filled with exciting challenges and opportunities. Keywords biogeography; biogeography data portal; historical biogeography; parametric models; phylogenomics; phylogeography Received: 21 July 2013; accepted: 25 Aug. 2013. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12705/625.15