Two ways to be endemic: Alps and Apennines are different functional refugia during climatic cycles

Endemics co-occur because they evolved in situ and persist regionally or because they evolved ex situ and later dispersed to shared habitats, generating evolutionary or ecological endemicity centres, respectively. We investigate whether different endemicity centres can intertwine in the region ranging from Alps to Sicily, by studying their butterfly fauna. We gathered an extensive occurrence dataset for butterflies of the study area (27,123 records, 269 species, in cells of 0.5x0.5 degrees of latitude-longitude). We applied molecular-based delimitation methods (GMYC model) to 26,557 COI sequences of Western Palearctic butterflies. We identified entities based on molecular delimitations and the most recent checklist of European butterflies and objectively attributed occurrences to their most probable entity. We obtained a zoogeographic regionalisation based on the 69 endemics of the area. Using phylogenetic ANOVA we tested if endemics from different centres differ from each other and fro...