Education Committee – Mission

Our mission addresses the third goal that founding members listed when we established the International Biogeography Society in 2001 – “promoting the training and education of biogeographers so that they may develop sound strategies for studying and conserving the world’s biota.”

Our central goal is to enlist the assistance and visions of our colleagues to develop an integrated strategy for expanding and enhancing the teaching of biogeography across the world’s colleges, universities and primary and secondary schools, and to a broader span of disciplines, with the ultimate goal that the geography of life will become an integral component of education and outreach to the lay public and all those interested in the natural world.

We believe that the patterns and drivers of the geography of life should be compelling subjects for all learned people, providing valuable lessons on the great stories of life across our planet. As summarized in a paper “On teaching that grand subject” (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9114w865), a genuinely enlightened education in Biogeography includes the following, invaluable lessons.

Invaluable Lessons

Any true student of science should have at least an introduction to the succession of visionary scientists and the progression of seminal ideas on how nature works, from ancient explorers who first developed a global view of nature, to contemporary figures in the fields of earth and biological sciences.

Descriptions of/and causal explanations for regular patterns of variation in environmental conditions across the Earth’s principal geographic dimensions (latitude, elevation, depth); form the foundations for a holistic understanding of our planet. Why do the tropics bracket the Equator; why deserts are located near 30 degrees N and S latitudes; why environmental characteristics (temperature, pressure, precipitation, light, etc.) exhibit consistent gradients with elevation above and depth below sea level?

Some of the most compelling and most fundamental lessons include the theories on the origins of the planet, storage and generation of heat energy in the planet’s core, and how this drives plate tectonics and resultant patterns of spatial and temporal variation in the planet’s geographic template.

The earliest insights on biological diversity were based on the lessons that evolution is a fundamental feature of nature, an indefatigable force and the product of fundamental laws of physics; that every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing closely allied species; and that evolution occurs across space as well as over time.

The first and most fundamental pattern of biogeography, Buffon’s Law, was first proposed in the 18th century and it holds that different regions, even those with similar environmental conditions, are inhabited by different species.

The foundations and frontiers of biogeography have focused on the patterns and causal explanations for why biological diversity varies with latitude across the globe, and with elevation in the terrestrial realm and with depth in the oceans. How and why the nature of life forms (their size, growth forms, physiology, behavior, life histories, etc.) varies across the Earth.

Following from the above, biogeographers have and continue to be at the forefront of discovering why large, tropical and mountainous islands and other isolated systems often are hotspots of diversity, endemicity and endangerment.

Throughout its history, biogeography formed the foundations for Ecology – both synergistically contributing to a more holistic understanding of how the species themselves influence patterns in distribution and diversity; that ecological feedback in the form of interactions among species affects the fundamental biogeographic processes of immigration, extinction and evolution and, in turn, all features of the diversity and geography of life.

Biogeography allows us to teach the perhaps humbling lesson that the same geographic, topographic and environmental characteristics that influence other life forms in their distributions and dynamics across space and time have also influenced our ancestors and surviving populations of our species.

Biogeography also provides invaluable insights for Conservation Biology, including the central and sobering lesson that ecologically advanced populations of humans have fundamentally altered the natural patterns in distributions and diversity of life across the planet, justifying the designation of a new period of life
on Earth – The Anthropocene.

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