Format: ORAL

Lpez-Estrada E.K.1, Sanmartn I1, Meseguer. A. 1

1 Real Jardín Botánico (RJB), CSIC, Madrid, Spain

South America was an island continent separated from other landmasses by large open seas for more than 50 million years. It was only when the Isthmus of Panama emerged from the sea, about 3 million years ago, that South America came into contact with North America and the Great American Biotic fauna Interchange (GABI) began. The long-term confinement of South American mammals resulted in the evolution of an exceptional endemic fauna, giving rise to the so-called Splendid Isolation diversification pattern proposed by Simpson. Nonetheless, whether this model can be extended to explain the outrageous diversification of the Neotropical angiosperm flora remains uncertain. It is unclear whether the isolation of South America was as strict for plants as it was for other groups of organisms, or whether angiosperms were able to disperse from other landmasses uninterruptedly during the isolation. It remains to be clarified as well, to what extent the arrival of new colonizers contributed to the extraordinary diversification pattern observed in the Neotropics today. To understand the effect that the disconnection of South America had on the evolution of the Neotropical flora, in this study we will reconstruct the global biogeographic history of angiosperms and examine the proportion of dispersal events into and out of the Neotropics that occurred throughout the Cenozoic. We will also investigate whether abiotic factors such as geographic distance or temperature directly affected dispersal opportunities into the Neotropics. Given the higher dispersal capacity of plants than animals, we hypothesize that the Splendid Isolation model will not hold for the Neotropical flora, and that several dispersal events between the Neotropics and other continents will be recovered during the Cenozoic.