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The northern and southern hemispheres of the earth have a dynamic history of advancing and retreating ice sheets. The glacial and interglacial periods are linked to regular eccentricities in the Earth’s orbit and correspond to approximately 100 kyr cycles. The advancing, or glacial periods can cause a massive displacement of flora and fauna as it drives them away from the poles, with the most recent glacial maximum having occurred about 20,000 years ago.,
A glacial refugium is a geographic region which made possible the survival of flora and fauna in times of ice ages and allowed for post-glacial re-colonization. Different types of glacial refugia can be distinguished, namely nunatak, peripheral and lowland refugia. Glacial refugia have been suggested as a major cause of the patterns of distributions of flora and fauna in both temperate and tropical latitudes. With respect to disjunct populations of modern-day species distributions, especially in birds, doubt has been cast on the validity of such inferences, as much of the differentiation between populations observed today may have occurred before or after their restriction to refugia. In contrast, isolated geographic locales that host one or more critically endangered species are generally uncontested as bona fide glacial refugia.
According to the northern cryptic glacial refugial hypothesis, during the last ice age cold tolerant plant and animal species persisted in ice-free microrefugia north of the Alps in Europe. The alternative hypothesis of no persistence and postglacial immigration of plants and animals from southern refugia in Europe is sometimes also called the tabula rasa hypothesis.
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Reid's Paradox of Rapid Plant Migration or Reid's Paradox, describes the observation from the paleoecological record that plant ranges shifted northward, after the last glacial maximum, at a faster rate than the seed dispersal rates commonly occur. Rare long-distance seed dispersal events have been hypothesized to explain these fast migration rates, but the dispersal vector(s) are still unknown. The plant species' geographic range expansion rates are compared to the actualistic rates of seed dispersal using mathematical models, and are graphically visualized using dispersal kernels. These observations made in the paleontological record, which inspired Reid's Paradox, are from fossilized remains of plant parts, including needles, leaves, pollen, and seeds, that can be used to identify past shifts in plant species' ranges.
References
- ↑ Dahl, Eilif (1987). "The Nunatak Theory Reconsidered". Ecological Bulletins (38): 77–94. ISSN 0346-6868. JSTOR 20112974.
- ↑ Segarra-Moragues, José Gabriel; Palop-Esteban, Marisa; González-Candelas, Fernando; Catalán, Pilar (2007). "Nunatak Survival vs. tabula rasa in the Central Pyrenees: A Study on the Endemic Plant Species Borderea pyrenaica (Dioscoreaceae)". Journal of Biogeography. 34 (11): 1893–1906. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2007.01740.x. ISSN 0305-0270. JSTOR 4640655. S2CID 84256685.
- ↑ Ægisdóttir, Hafdís Hanna; Þórhallsdóttir, Þóra Ellen (2004). "Theories on migration and history of the North-Atlantic flora: A review". Jökull: The Icelandic Journal of Earth Sciences (54): 1–15. ISSN 0449-0576 . Retrieved 2020-08-28– via ResearchGate.
- ↑ Birks, H. J. B. (1993-12-15). "Is the hypothesis of survival on glacial nunataks necessary to explain the present-day distributions of Norwegian mountain plants?". Phytocoenologia. 23 (1–4): 399–426. doi:10.1127/phyto/23/1993/399.
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