Centres of species richness, neoendemism, and paleoendemism for marine fishes occur in different regions of Aotearoa New Zealand
Description
We examined the historical biogeography of marine fish biodiversity in the 0-500 m depth layer in Aotearoa New Zealand and adjacent areas of the Southwest Pacific using taxonomic and phylogenetic metrics. We built checklists of taxa occurring in our focal depth zone using open-access repositories, and generated distribution maps with AquaMaps for 313 taxa that have phylogenetic data as they are included in the most up-to-date molecular phylogeny for New Zealand's actinopterygians. Here, we present the results for five datasets that differ on five occurrence probabilities selected from AquaMaps. Using the Biodiverse software to compute biodiversity metrics, we found that spatial patterns of richness and endemism differ. We propose evolutionary hypotheses to explain our results.