Mediterran, kontinental und arkto-alpin: Die drei biogeographischen Grundmuster Europas und des Mittelmeerraumes am Beispiel von Schmetterlingen / Mediterranean, Continental and Arctic-alpine: The three Major Biogeographical Patterns of Europe and the Mediterranean presented on Butterfly Examples
Auteur : Schmitt (Thomas Haubrich)
Année de publication : 2009
Publication : Entomologie heute
Volume :
21
Pagination : 3-19
Résumé :
The pleistocene climatic fluctuations have had strong impacts on the distribution pattern of species in the western Palearctic. Due to these climatic influences, three main biogeographical types have evolved in Europe and the Mediterranean region. (i) Mediterranean faunal elements had refuge areas in the different sub-refuges of the Mediterranean and expanded their distributions in many cases over major parts of Central Europe during the postglacial. During this process of range expansion, the Pyrenees and the Alps represented major expansion barriers, and respective to which of these mountain ranges acted as barrier or not, four different paradigms of postglacial range expansion evolved for these faunal elements. Habitat specialists often suffered losses of genetic diversity during range expansions whereas generalists in many cases did not. Even within the refuges of the single peninsulas of the Mediterranean, genetic structures and disjunctions existed during the Würm glacial period or even longer. The corridors of the postglacial range expansions can be reconstructed in some cases by the regional distribution of genetic information. (ii) The continental species mostly include the group of species considered of Siberian or Manchurian origin by DE LATTIN. However, genetic analyses showed that the major proportion of these species has not reached Europe during the postglacial range expansion from eastern Asia, but have survived in extra-Mediterranean refugia in Europe at least the last ice age. These refuges were located around the glaciated Alps, in the Carpathian Basin, in the Carpathians themselves as well as in the extraMediterranean regions of the Balkan Peninsula. The genetic patterns evolving in these species are often highly complex, but mostly show higher genetic diversities in the more eastern parts of Europe. (iii) In the group of species today distributed in the Arctic and/or in the high mountain systems of Europe, much more complex genetic structures were observed as would be explained by simple postglacial retreat from the zonal periglacial regions into the Arctic and the high altitudes of mountains. This scenario seems to be valid for some of the species with arctic-alpine disjunctions, but some of these species show stronger differentiation of populations located in more marginal mountain ranges of Europe hereby suggesting their glacial isolation from the large periglacial zonal region. In particular, the alpine disjunct species express highly complex genetic structures indicating strongly disjunct distribution patterns also during glaciations, with the distributions partly being restricted to the foothills of high mountain systems and partly between two different high mountain systems. Similar patterns were also found for the species of the mountain forest realm.