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Boundaries of the Western Palearctic in the Middle East? (1 Viewer)

wintibird

André Weiss
Opus Editor
On Tommy Pedersen's website http://www.tommypedersen.com/UAE.htm the United Arab Emirates are a part of the Western Palearctic. I also found on the Internet (lost the site) the sentences: "Have you read the latest British birds? We are now in the WP".
I searched on the net but found nothing indicating that the boundaries of the WP in the Middle East have changed.
Has someone more informations about this? What are the arguments for that? (to enlarge our WP-list? ;) ).

Thanks for all answers.
Greetings from Switzerland

André
 
Given all the mentioned sites it looks for me as if the UAE and the companies there have decided on their own to be a part of the Western Palearctic to attract more birders....?

Of course the boundaries of zoogeographic units are arbitary (and sometimes not really practicable, eg in the Himalayas). But what were the arguments to keep most of the Arabic peninsula out and what are the arguments to include it?

Still waiting for enlightment

André
 
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The 'British Birds' article (Dec 2006) by Kees Roselaar is a good analysis of how the Palearctic boundry has varied, and offers a strong case for a redrawing based on a computer analysis of the breeding distribution maps of 1,037 passerines prepared for the forthcoming 'Handbook of Geographical Variation and Distribution of Palearctic Birds'. The boundry is drawn based on where the number of breeding Palearctic and Afrotropical/Oriental passerine species reaches an equilibrium. As regards the Arabian peninsula, this revised boundry includes the whole region except the mountains of the S and SW, which are considered Afrotropical, and the coastal plain of N Oman, which is considered Oriental. The 10 endemic Arabian species, which are found in the SW, played a strong role. 8 showed a close morphological resemblance to Afrotropical or Oriental species.
 
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Pity i don't have accesss to BB. I wonder what quality are distribution data from Arabian peninsula which were used for these maps?
 
jurek said:
Pity i don't have accesss to BB. I wonder what quality are distribution data from Arabian peninsula which were used for these maps?
To paraphrase part of the article (but still understandable I hope):

Southern border of the Palearctic was established by comparing separate breeding distribution maps of 1,037 passerine species. Maps compiled when working on species texts for BWP from 1987 onwards, but also cover all songbirds which occur outside WP in Eurasia and Africa north of 5 degrees N. Maps not the same as in BWP, but are partly based on the same sources. For outside WP maps are more detailed than BWP - more than 4000 papers and books, covering last 150 years, used to compile them, including all latest breeding-bird atlas data. Locations named on thousands of specimen labels also checked. The maps will eventually be published in Roselaar & Shirihai 'Handbook of Geographical Variation and Distribution of Palearctic Birds'.
For analysis, maps were converted into digital format using WorldMap. Palearctic was divided into equal grid cells so that each cell covered 4,062 sq km, which means the maps look slightly distorted, but enabled easy comparison of actual range size of a northern breeder with that of a southern breeder.
 
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