This Week In Science

摘要

Quantifying the relative influence of present-day environmental conditions and geological history on the spatial distribution of species represents a major challenge in microbial ecology. Ecological approaches to distinguish between these two biogeographic controls are limited by environmental variability both in space and through time (see the Perspective by Patterson). Using a 1.5-million-year fossil record of marine diatoms, Cermeno and Falkowski (p. 1539) show that, even at the largest (global) spatial scale, the dispersal of marine diatoms is not very limited.