Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Raven and Axelrod, 1974;Wen et al., 2013). As biogeography advances, increasing attention has been paid to understanding distributional patterns and the processes shaping them (Wen et al., 2010;Ficetola et al., 2017;You et al., 2024).In phytogeography, two major frameworks have emerged: the florabased approach, which focuses on assemblages of species in defined regions, and the taxon-based approach, which centers on individual lineages and their spatial evolution.While the flora-based approach has recently gained grounds as a tool for regionalization (Liu et al., 2023;Minev-Benzecry and Daru, 2024), the taxon-based method-originally reliant on morphological traits and geographic distributions (Raven and Axelrod, 1974;Wu, 1991;Wu et al., 2003)-has expanded greatly through molecular phylogenetics and phylogenomics.This expansion has enabled detailed biogeographic reconstructions at the family, genus, and species levels, shedding light on vegetation evolution (Hai et al., 2022), floristic formation (Nie et al., 2016;Chen et al., 2018), and broader Earth history reconstruction (Ding et al., 2020).Nevertheless, largescale, taxon-based analyses at higher taxonomic levels remain comparatively under-explored.In a recent issue of the Journal of Integrative Plant Biology, Huang et al. (2025) addressed this gap by assembling the most comprehensive global dataset to date on extant seed plant families.By integrating current taxonomic frameworks with distribution, biogeographic origins, and formation time and mechanisms, they constructed SSES.This novel framework is built upon unsupervised machine learning methods-most notably Kmeans clustering-and for the first time classifies 429 seed plant families into 18 distribution types, six distribution supertypes, and three major floristic elements: cosmopolitan, tropical, and temperate.The SSES offers a systematic synthesis that captures macro-scale distributional regularities, providing new insight into how similar spatial patterns may have arisen from comparable formation processes and mechanisms.This study also offers a new paradigm for conducting biogeographic
DOI: 10.1111/jipb.70013
Author: Jun Wen
Institutions: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History
Language: English
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4413050453