Part IV

COMPARATIVE PHYLOGEOGRAPHY IN A CONCEPTUAL SENSE

One final dimension in which phylogeography can be considered “comparative” is through its interactions with various other biodiversity disciplines. This general topic has already been addressed by several of this colloquium’s authors. For example, Bowen et al. (Chapter 1) explicitly link modern marine phylogeography to traditional biogeographic perspectives on biodiversity in the sea; Wakely et al. (Chapter 5), Mehta et al. (Chapter 6), and others relate phylogeography to historical population demography, coalescent theory, and traditional population genetics; Edwards et al. (Chapter 9) explicitly weighed and contrasted comparative phylogeography with molecular phylogenetics and phylogenomics; Heintzman et al. (Chapter 13) and Prates et al. (Chapter 3), among others, advocated the incorporation of more paleoecology into phylogeography; and several authors touched upon the special relevance of phylogeographic findings for the field of conservation biology. The final chapter in this book provides one further example of how comparative phylogeography relates to yet another emerging biodiversity field.

The term “landscape genetics” has blossomed in recent years into a recognizable and popular research arena, purportedly forming a needed bridge between landscape ecology and population genetics (much as the field of phylogeography attempted to bridge phylogenetics and population genetics). In Chapter 16, Leslie Rissler recounts the relatively recent (as well as deeper) conceptual histories of both phylogeography and landscape genetics, strives to highlight different empirical and intellectual emphases in these two fields, and speculates on some major research areas

ripe for further investigation in the emerging era of genomics. She concludes by advocating a union of comparative phylogeography and landscape genetics under the broader umbrella of biogeography, which has always sought to connect ecology and evolutionary biology. The union of comparative phylogeography and biogeography is a theme that emerged in the Chapter 1, was elaborated throughout this book (Chapters 8 and 11, and elsewhere), and is eloquently summarized in this final contribution.