Abstract

MIGUEZ-GUTIERREZ, Alejandra; CASTILLO, Jesús; MARQUEZ, Juan  and  GOYENECHEA, Irene. Biogeography of the Mexican Transition Zone based on a reconciled trees analysis. Rev. Mex. Biodiv. [online]. 2013, vol.84, n.1, pp.215-224. ISSN 2007-8706.  https://doi.org/10.7550/rmb.32119.

We analyzed the relationships of the areas of endemism of the Mexican Transition Zone through 3 hypotheses of regionalization. We used a reconciled trees method based on the phylogenies of 10 genera of beetles, gymnosperms, lizards and snakes. Seven general area cladograms were generated using assumptions 0 and 1 and the Nelson and majority consensus. They showed 2 groups of areas, 1 with Neotropical affinities and the other with Nearctic affinities. The Sierra Madre del Sur resulted as the sister area of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. Other constant patterns were the area that involves Tamaulipas and Texas as sister area of the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, and the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala were always recovered as the sister area of the Talamanca ridge. Our results suggest that the most important vicariant events within the Mexican Transition Zone are the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, which divides the majority of the endemism areas with Neartic affinities (north to this) from those endemism areas of Neotropical affinities (south to this) and the Tehuantepec Isthmus; which together with the Nicaraguan depression isolates Nuclear Central America. Other patterns appear in either regionalization proposal, but not within the 3, and require future studies in order to find well supported explanations. Even though our results have appeared in previous hypotheses, there are worth due to the fact that we include phylogenetic information of different taxa, we employed reconciled trees, an insufficiently used method, and we searched for congruence between results using 3 regionalization proposals.

Keywords : cladistic biogeographic analysis; snakes; lizards; beetles; gymnosperms; USA; Mexico; Central America.

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