Blurring the picture: introductions, invasions, extinctions – biogeography in a global world

Global biogeography and phylogeography have gained importance as research topics in zoology, as attested by the steady increase in the number of journals devoted to this topic and the number of papers published. Yet, in a globalising world, with species reintroductions, invasions of alien species, and large-scale extinctions, unravelling the true biogeographic relationships between areas and species may become increasingly difficult. We present an introduction to the symposium ‘Biogeography: explaining and predicting species distributions in space and time’ held in Amsterdam in 2007, and the resulting papers as published in this special issue, including papers on crustaceans, birds and mammals.