Abstract
Neotropical seasonally dry forests are found from northwestern Mexico to northern Argentina and southwestern Brazil in separate areas of varying size (fig.1-1). Their different variants have not always been considered the same vegetation type (e.g., Hueck 1978) or biogeographic unit (e.g., Cabrera and Willink 1980), but recent work has helped to define the extent, distribution, and phytogeography of seasonally dry tropical forest (SDTF) as a coherent biome with a wide Neotropical distribution (Prado and Gibbs 1993; Pennington et al. 2000; Pennington, Lewis et al. 2006). This unified interpretation is important both for biogeographic inference and for setting conservation priorities in Neotropical SDTF, which is the most threatened tropical forest type in the world (Miles et al. 2006).
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Darwin Initiative for a Scholarship to Reynaldo Linares-Palomino, the Royal Society of Edinburgh International Exchange Programme for a travel bursary to Ary Oliveira-Filho, and the Leverhulme Trust for a Study Abroad Fellowship to Toby Pennington.
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Linares-Palomino, R., Oliveira-Filho, A.T., Pennington, R.T. (2011). Neotropical Seasonally Dry Forests: Diversity, Endemism, and Biogeography of Woody Plants. In: Dirzo, R., Young, H.S., Mooney, H.A., Ceballos, G. (eds) Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-021-7_1
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