Seminar notice-invited by Dr. Bruce Waldman: 2012.09.12, 3:30pm Building 500, Room L307

 Abstract. Conservation biologists have long appreciated the significance of Palawan’s land vertebrates.  Traditionally considered an extension of the Sunda Shelf, Palawan’s fauna is uniquely important for conservation in the Philippines, in part because it is so different from faunas found elsewhere in the archipelago.  However, on a regional scale, the island has sometimes been viewed as a simple faunistic peninsula of northern Borneo. This view may have limited Palawan’s perceived conservation value.

We summarized distributional and phylogenetic data for terrestrial land vertebrates of Palawan.  Apparently contradicting earlier impressions, numerous phylogenetic studies now document close relationships between Palawan’s endemic vertebrates and those of the oceanic Philippines.  More than half of the lineages we identified reveal relationships with the oceanic Philippines.

Results of summarizing phylogenetic and taxonomic data suggest Palawan’s vertebrate fauna has been assembled through a combination of processes.  Rather than a simple nested subset of Sunda Shelf populations, Palawan is best viewed as a transitionalregion that has played a variety of biogeographic roles, including young and old extension of the Sunda Shelf, a springboard to diversification in the Philippines, and a biogeographic component of the Philippines.  Because Palawan probably existed as an oceanic island prior to its approach to Borneo, the complex set of biogeographic relationships we infer are not entirely unexpected.  In this paper we synthesize the new body of phylogenetic studies, discuss the complex biogeographic relationships they suggest, and highlight the conservation significance of the Palawan region, as a unique, transitional filter zone between Sundaic and Wallacean faunas.