Reconstructing Caribbean Landscapes to Understand Biodiversity Patterns

Integrating dynamic paleogeographic reconstructions into biodiversity studies reveals that Caribbean patterns of diversity, endemism, and biotic assembly arose through a combination of geodynamic processes rather than solely through long-distance overwater dispersal across a stable archipelago. Present-day biodiversity reflects the cumulative imprint of long-term geodynamic processes that continuously reshaped the region’s landscapes throughout the Cenozoic. Geodynamic reconstructions that integrate plate kinematics, subduction dynamics, and intraplate deformation show that the Caribbean evolved through successive phases of uplift, subsidence, rotation, and fragmentation, producing a highly dynamic configuration, extent, and connectivity of emerged landmasses. Subduction-related uplift and arc migration periodically generated shallow platforms, emergent volcanic arcs, and island chains that temporarily reduced marine barriers between the American continents and Caribbean islands. Conversely, tectonic reorganization and subsidence fragmented these connections, isolating landmasses and reorganizing drainage systems. These alternations between connectivity and isolation are central to understanding the timing and pathways of biotic dispersal and diversification. By explicitly incorporating block rotations, vertical motions, and plate-boundary reconfigurations, geodynamic reconstructions provide physical constraints on when and where terrestrial and freshwater dispersal routes existed. These reconstructions therefore offer a critical temporal and spatial framework for interpreting phylogenetic divergence times, colonization pulses, and patterns of endemism across the Caribbean biodiversity hotspot. In particular, they help reconcile apparent mismatches between biological and geological timescales by identifying short-lived but recurrent windows of connectivity that facilitated biotic exchange. This integrated geodynamic-biogeographic perspective underscores that Caribbean biodiversity is inseparable from the region’s tectonic evolution: deep Earth processes governed the emergence and disappearance of habitats, structured ecological connectivity, and ultimately shaped the assembly of one of the world’s most diverse and endemic island systems.