Neotropical diversification – the book

In November 2016, Springer contacted me to write a book on neotropical diversification. I proposed an edited book including as many views as possible on this fascinating topic and inivted Ana Carnaval, from the City University of New York, to join me as co-editor. She accepted. We invited all relevant researchers we know who are working on the subject and most of them have accepted to contrribute. To date, we have managed to gather about 50 confirmed papers including a wide range of geographical settings and organism types, as well as several meta-analyses and a number of theoretcial and conceptual pieces.

We plan to subdivide the book into four main parts, namely:

• an introductory part describing current neotropical biodiversity patterns (both terrestrial and aquatic) in relation to environmental features
• a conceptual part with chapters on the role of past tectonic, paleogeographic and climatic changes on Neotropical diversification, containing as many visions as possible (multidisciplinary views combining phylogeography, paleoecology and other relevant disciplines are especially welcome)
• an empirical part composed by emblematic or relevant case studies, representing a variety of environments and taxonomic groups (meta-analyses are especially encouraged)
• a synthetic part with theoretical papers on the current status of the problem and suggestions for future developments

We submitted the proposal to Springer a couple of weeks ago and are now we waiting for an answer.