Desert lizard diversity worldwide: Effects of environment, time, and evolutionary rate

Aim: Biodiversity is not uniformly distributed across the Earth's surface, even among physiographically comparable biomes in different biogeographic regions. For lizards, the world's large desert regions are characterized by extreme heterogeneity in species richness, spanning some of the most species-rich (arid Australia) and species-poor (central Asia) biomes overall. Regional differences in species diversity may arise as a consequence of the interplay of several factors (e.g., evolutionary time, diversification rate, environment), but their relative importance for biogeographic patterns remains poorly known. Here we use distributional and phylogenetic data to assess the evolutionary and ecological drivers of large-scale variation in desert lizard diversity.
Location: Deserts worldwide.
Major taxa studied: Lizards (non-snake squamates).
Methods: We specifically test whether diversity patterns are best explained by differences in the ages of arid-adapted lineages (evolutionary time hypo..., ,