Biome Transitions in Plants

We continue to develop the idea that the nature and the rate of evolutionary transitions between different biomes has had important consequences for global patterns of plant diversity (e.g., the latitudinal species richness gradient). The key underlying concept is “accessibility,” where this applies to the relative evolutionary ease of making major physiological shifts, but also to the adjacency of different environments through time. An immediate goal is a phylogenetic synthesis of biome transition data across seed plants.