CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTAL CORRELATES OF ENDEMIC BIRD AREAS DERIVED FROM METEOROLOGICAL SATELLITE SENSORS

The present-day distribution of centres of endemism is the result of a n interplay between historical biogeography and contemporary environme ntal conditions. The relative importance of these two factors has neve r been established, however, for want of information on both the distr ibutions themselves and the continental-scale measurement of environme ntal variables. Recently published maps of arian endemism in Africa, a nd the increasing availability of continental-scale surrogates of clim atic conditions derived from Earth-orbiting satellites, have allowed t his problem to be addressed directly In this paper, temporal, Fourier- processed surrogate meteorological data derived from both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's series of polar-orbiting met eorological satellites and the geostationary Meteosat satellites are u sed within a discriminant analytical framework to describe and predict areas of bird endemism in East Africa. The technique predicts endemic bird areas (EBAs) with an accuracy of 89% !mean 85%, range 70-89%). C ontemporary environmental conditions, ultimately determined by climate , therefore appear to account for a substantial fraction of the observ ed variation in the distribution of EBAs. On the basis of these result s, several hypotheses proposed to explain the distribution of centres of avian endemism are reviewed.