Читать книгу Biogeography - Группа авторов - Страница 13

The Oxford English Dictionary defines biogeography as “the branch of biology that deals with the geographical distribution of plants and animals. Also: the characteristics of an area or organism in this respect” (OED 2021). The definition is extremely broad, and present-day biogeographers work on a myriad of topics with very different aims and methods. In this sense, biogeography is multidisciplinary, namely the geographical aspect of any field of study that deals with natural objects, be it animals, plants, bacteria fungi, viruses, humans and abiogenesis. It has even made it into nursing pedagogy. In any case, biogeography is a field of enquiry that is dependent on the questions, aims and methods of a particular field. Ecological biogeography, for instance, endeavors to answer ecological questions using methods in ecology. Biogeography is not an independent science with its own unique methods, aims or goals, and attempts to unify it as an “integrative biogeography” have not been successful. Rather than unifying, integrative biogeography discarded a whole suite of approaches and goals in favor of others. We only need to look at the 18th century origins of plant and animal geographies to see that attempts at unification had posed theoretical as well as methodological problems, leading to a split by the end of the 19th century and an abrupt hiatus by the beginning of the 20th century.