agrobiodiversity (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Newsom. Lourdes Pérez Iglesias.

The Caribbean’s pre-peopling flora and fauna were the culminations of both vicariant and long-distance dispersal processes, coupled with evolution in relative isolation spanning more than 20 Mya. Human colonization beginning around 7,000 years ago coincided with extinctions of megalonychid sloths and giant flightless owls-- the archipelago’s only large terrestrial vertebrates-- probably precipitating the first human-induced trophic cascades and initiating the first of a series of...