BACKGROUND Ever since Darwin, natural scientists have turned to islands for inspiration
and for model systems. For the past half century, they have done so largely within the …

Islands are geographically defined as land masses completely surrounded by water, and
island systems have been used as models for many biogeographic, ecological, and …

Colonization, speciation and extinction are dynamic processes that influence global patterns
of species richness,,,,–. Island biogeography theory predicts that the contribution of these …

Understanding the origins of biodiversity has been an aspiration since the days of early
naturalists. The immense complexity of ecological, evolutionary, and spatial processes …

Macroecology and biogeography are concerned with understanding biodiversity patterns
across space and time. In the past, the two disciplines have addressed this question mainly …

Macroecology has traditionally relied on descriptive characterization of large-scale
ecological patterns to offer narrative explanations for the origin and maintenance of those …

Aim Mountains and islands are both well known for their high endemism. To explain this
similarity, parallels have been drawn between the insularity of “true islands”(land …

Aim Much of our current understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes comes
from island research. With the increasing availability of data on distributions and …

Abstract Aim The General Dynamic Model (GDM) links island biogeographical processes to
island geological history. A key premise of the GDM implies that environmental factors …

Aim The relation of plant dispersal syndromes with insular species richness patters remains
one of the challenges in island biogeography, especially as people have affected species …