Summary: Carnaval et al. (2009)

Regions with high species endemism and considered to be threatened (conservation priority) are categorised as biodiversity hotspots. In the face of rapid environmental change, effective conservation may be difficult because biodiversity distribution data are too sparse. Carnaval et al. (2009) suggest that late quaternary climate fluctuations helped to shape present-day diversity in temperate and boreal systems and provide a general context for understanding current patterns of endemism. They compared alternative hypotheses of assemblage-scale responses to late Quaternary climate change using frogs as indicator species, ecological niche models under palaeoclimates and simultaneous Bayesian analyses of multispecies molecular data. They suggest that a hotspot for conservation priority lies within the Brazilian Atlantic forest hotspot. Furthermore, they show that the southern Atlantic forest was climatically unstable relative to the central region, and it served as a large climatic refugium for neotropical species in the late Pleistocene. Carnaval et al. (2009) suggest that this sets new priorities for conservation in Brazil and establishes a validated approach to biodiversity prediction for other understudied, species-rich regions.