A New Dawn for Protist Biogeography

Aim

Biogeographers have believed for a long time that the geographical distributions of protists are only determined by environmental conditions, because dispersal is not limited. During the past two decades, the field has come a long way to show that historical and spatial factors also significantly contribute to shaping protist distributions, calling for a reappraisal of our understanding of protist biogeography.

Methods

We review the current state-of-the-art on the field of protist biogeography, highlighting several outstanding questions and opportunities. Our review brings together insights from different disciplines, ranging from morphology-based research to environmental, population and speciation genomics.

Results

Protist communities harbour cosmopolitan and geographically restricted species and are shaped by both local environmental conditions and historical processes, yet the relative contributions of these patterns and processes likely differs depending on the geographic scale, protist lineage and the habitat that is being investigated. The field is ready to move beyond the decades-long ubiquity versus (moderate) endemicity discourse and to instead ask why and where specific protist species and clades are more prone to widespread or restricted distributions. With the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies, from whole-genome sequencing to environmental and ancient DNA surveys, it is now possible to integrate insights from multiple lines of evidence and investigate protist communities, species and populations at an unprecedented scale and detail.

Outlook

To further advance the field, the protist community needs to focus on understudied habitats and protist lineages, study the impact of protist traits on biogeographical patterns, perform targeted field and experimental work to disentangle the processes that underlie protist biogeographies and expand and develop databases with sequence, trait, distributional and phylogenetic information of protists. Given that a good understanding of species boundaries is central to unravelling protist biogeography, it remains crucial to invest in polyphasic taxonomic research.