Analytical Approaches in Biogeography: Advances and Challenges

The last decades have seen an explosion of analytical approaches in biogeography. From parsimony-based cladistic and event-based biogeography, we have moved into the expanding world of parametric model-based methods. This chapter mainly focuses on the latter, which are less than a decade old, but reviews previous approaches, as they provide a background on the shifting focus from phylogenetic relationships and Earth history to the integration of other disciplines (ecology, paleontology and population genetics), to understand historical processes that shaped Earth's biodiversity. While event-based methods have been superseded by parametric probabilistic approaches that integrate the time dimension, they remain popular in fields where molecular data is not available, such as paleontology. Bayes-DIVA is a semiparametric model since it contains a parametric (Bayesian phylogenetic inference) and a nonparametric (parsimony biogeographic inference) component.