Species distributions and speciation have been studied for generations. Recently, relatively fine scale spatial databases as well as explicit, and truly predictive, phylogenetic frameworks have become availaable. These allow us to make comparisons of precise attributes of the environment to actual speciation events, and distributional limits, over the entire range of any given phylogenetic unit. In this symposium we will discuss the relationship of spatial environmental parameters to species distributions at scales from very local to global, and in habitats from the rainforest to desert. We will explore very different methods of modelling species distributions and of relating those distributions to individual and collective evolutionary histories.

Key words: Cladogenesis, Distribution, Environmental Parameters, Geographic Information Systems, Phylogeny, Ranges, Speciation, Species, Spatial, Taxonomy