Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rheindt, Frank E
• Prawiradilaga, Dewi M
• Ashari, Hidayat
• Suparno
• Gwee, Chyi Yin
• Lee, Geraldine W X
• Wu, Meng Yue
• Ng, Nathaniel S R

Titel

A lost world in Wallacea: Description of a montane archipelagic avifauna

Ist Teil von

• Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 2020-01, Vol.367 (6474), p.167-170

Ort / Verlag

United States

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Birds are the best-known animal class, with only about five or six new species descriptions per year since 1999. Integrating genomic and phenotypic research with arduous fieldwork in remote regions, we describe five new songbird species and five new subspecies from a small area near Sulawesi, Indonesia, all collected in a single 6-week expedition. Two factors contributed to the description of this large number of species from such a small geographic area: (i) Knowledge of Quaternary Period land connections helped pinpoint isolated islands likely to harbor substantial endemism and (ii) studying accounts of historic collectors such as Alfred Wallace facilitated the identification of undercollected islands. Our findings suggest that humans' understanding of biogeographically complex regions such as Wallacea remains incomplete.