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Australian Journal of Botany Australian Journal of Botany Society
Southern hemisphere botanical ecosystems
REVIEW (Open Access)

Carving up Australia’s arid zone: a review of the bioregionalisation of the Eremaean and Eyrean biogeographic regions

M. C. Ebach https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9594-9010 A C and D. J. Murphy B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Changing Earth Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.

B Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Melbourne, Vic. 3004, Australia.

C Corresponding author. Email: mcebach@gmail.com

Australian Journal of Botany 68(3) 229-244 https://doi.org/10.1071/BT19077
Submitted: 24 April 2019  Accepted: 20 April 2020   Published: 1 June 2020

Journal Compilation © CSIRO 2020 Open Access CC BY-NC-ND

Abstract

The Eremaean region, Australia’s arid biome and biogeographic region, has been discussed by botanists (and as the Eyrean, its counterpart for zoogeographers) for over 150 years, yet little progress was made in defining it as an area of endemism until the 2000s. As Australia’s largest biome and biogeographic region, the Eremaean has been defined in a climate sense, but is a historically composite biogeographic area. Taxa that inhabit the Eremaean (Eyrean) tend to display sister relationships to those outside the biome in temperate and monsoonal biome areas, indicating that two or more temporally discordant distributional patterns exist in the Australian flora and fauna. The future of Eremean and Eyrean bioregionalisation will need to incorporate these temporal patterns when constructing new bioregionalisations and historical and climate-based biogeographic models.

Additional keywords: Bassian, biomes, comparative biogeography, Euronotian, Torresian.


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