Dissecting macroecological and macroevolutionary patterns of forest biodiversity across the Hawaiian archipelago.

ABSTRACT: Biodiversity patterns emerge as a consequence of evolutionary and ecological processes. Their relative importance is frequently tested on model ecosystems such as oceanic islands that vary in both. However, the coarse-scale data typically used in biogeographic studies have limited inferential power to separate the effects of historical biogeographic factors (e.g., island age) from the effects of ecological ones (e.g., island area and habitat heterogeneity). Here, we describe local-scale biodiversity patterns of woody plants using a database of more than 500 forest plots from across the Hawaiian archipelago, where these volcanic islands differ in age by several million years. We show that, after controlling for factors such as island area and heterogeneity, the oldest islands (Kaua'i and O'

SUBMITTER: Craven D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6697879 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature