Fundamentals and applications of geographic information system in biogeography and its related fields

Biogeography, an interdisciplinary field drawing on evolutionary ecology, community ecology, and conservation biology, aims to elucidate the processes shaping species distributions from both ecological and historical perspectives. Since the 1990s, biogeography has been advanced by the growth of phylogeography, with its basis in genetic analysis. New analytical tools, including geographic information systems (GIS), climate simulations, and ecological niche modeling (ENM), have brought further innovations. Combining simulations of past or future climates with ENM has allowed the estimation of past or future species distributions. Furthermore, combined analyses using GIS-related tools can reveal the processes of niche differentiation and speciation, and be used to reconstruct the migration histories of biological communities. In this review, we highlight useful analytical tools and data sources and explore their practical applications in biogeography and related fields. Next, we discuss the prospects of biogeography as a more integrated field, combining various data sources such as ancient DNA and the unprecedented amount of genetic data now available from next-generation sequencers.