A cornerstone in Amazonian biogeography has been that large rivers and their floodplains delimit distributions of many taxa in the mostly continuous forest landscape. This would promote allopatric speciation and divide Amazonia into biogeographical subunits. However, our recent research suggests that the central Amazonian fluvial network has been more dynamic than biogeographers have generally assumed: relatively recent river capture events have changed both the positions of and tributary arrangements between many large rivers, potentially leading to unexpeted patterns of genetic differentiation in both terrestrial and aquatic taxa. This project will combine explicit models of landscape and fluvial network evolution, environmental heterogeneity and genomic structure of several animal groups that differ in dispersal ability and habitat specialization in order to produce a more holistic view on the origin and structuring of Amazoninan biodiversity than has been possible before.

2022

2026