Abstract:

Background & Aims: With the integrated development of earth sciences and life sciences. geogenomics—an interdisciplinary field integrating geology, geomorphology, geomorphology, paleoclimatology, genomics, phylogenetics, population genetics, and biogeography—links surface landscape changes to biological evolution. This field has become an effective way for testing geological hypotheses and reconstructing Earth’s history, as well as exploring its co-evolution with life. Geogenomics also shows significant potential in global ecological conservation. 

Methods: In this review, we systematically introduce the fundamental concepts and key scientific questions of geogenomics, as well as its relationship to related research fields. We retrieved the Web of Science core collection, and analyze the evolution of themes and hotspots in geogenomics through bibliometric analysis. 

Review Results: As an emerging interdisciplinary field, geogenomics deeply integrates geological, climatic, and genomic data to inverts the spatio-temporal patterns and interactions between geological structure movements and the history and distribution changes of biological groups. This field holds significant promise for advancing geological and biological evolution. We focus on five key aspects: testing geological hypotheses; elucidating regional or intercontinental scale geological processes; inferring regional biodiversity evolution history; addressing uncertainties in geological reconstruction and scale effects, as well as the geographical distribution patterns and dispersal origins of pathogens. 

Perspectives: At present, research in this field is still limited in our country, but it has been carried out on several important scientific questions, such as the uplift history was highly variable of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and the evolution of the Yangtze and Yellow River systems. In the future, it is imperative to enhance the application of multidisciplinary approaches, develop more effective tools, and advocate for the establishment of a global geogenomics research database.

Key words: geogenomics, species evolution, geological process, hypothesis, interdisciplinary, high-throughput sequencing