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Species distribution and endemism

A recent study by three partners in the DRYFLOR network revealed that β diversity of woody plants is high among neotropical dry forest nuclei. Linares-Palomino et al. (2011) assembled a database of 3839 species from 806 and floristic lists across the range of neotropical dry forest.  Floristic similarity is low between the major nuclei of dry forest. It is perhaps unsurprising that areas as widely separate as the Caribbean islands and the Brazilian caatinga show low Sørensen index (a commonly used index of floristic similarity) similarities of only 0.07. More startling are Sørensen similarities of only 0.14 for woody floras of dry forest of the Mantaro and Marañon valleys in Peru separated by only 400km. In the analysis of Linares-Palomino et al. (2011), of 253 possible pairwise comparisons of dry forest regions, 203 pairs had low Sørensen similarities of less than 0.30, which corroborates a transect study of 20 dry forest sites  across Mexico, whose average Sørensen similarity was only 0.09 (Trejo & Dirzo 2002).