| Abstract [eng] |
This work reviews the features of biota organisation across space and time. It argues that the Bretskyan hierarchy theory (Spiridonov & Eldredge, 2024) provides the most effective analytical framework for studying the spatiotemporal organisation of biota. This leads to the central problem addressed in the study: there are no methods capable of identifying the units of the Bretskyan hierarchy—geobiomes—from empirical palaeontological data. Moreover, the suitability of existing methods for delineating and analysing geobiomes has never previously been evaluated. This study provides the first systematic assessment of the suitability of various quantitative bioregionalisation and biogeographical methods for geobiome identification and analysis. The work introduces a new family of hierarchical spatial data partitioning methods, HespDiv, and its two constituent methods—hespdiv and birese. It is demonstrated that these methods outperform other existing approaches in distinguishing the units of the Bretskyan hierarchy. Two case studies in which these methods were applied are presented. The first, using hespdiv, reveals the biogeography of Miocene mammals across the territory of the United States. The second, applying birese to ostracod abundance data, reveals the Mulde/lundgreni biotic event interval in the Gėluva-118 drill core, its biotic structure and duration. Spiridonov, A., & Eldredge, N. (2024). The Bretskyan hierarchy, multiscale allopatry, and geobiomes—on the nature of evolutionary things. Paleobiology, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/pab.2023.37. |
