Area, isolation, and climate explain the diversity of mammals on island worldwide ...
Identifying the determinants of insular biodiversity at large scales remains a question in biogeography. We conducted a global test of island biogeography theory by evaluating the importance of island physical, environmental, and historical characteristics on mammal species richness and endemism. We...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | English |
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Dryad
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.hmgqnk9j2 https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.hmgqnk9j2 |
| Summary: | Identifying the determinants of insular biodiversity at large scales remains a question in biogeography. We conducted a global test of island biogeography theory by evaluating the importance of island physical, environmental, and historical characteristics on mammal species richness and endemism. We quantified the effects of island characteristics while accommodating variation among biogeographic realms by fitting generalized linear and mixed models. Analyzes were also performed separately for bats and non-volant mammals. Diversity patterns were most consistently influenced by the physical characteristics of the islands. Area positively affected mammal diversity, in particular the number of non-volant endemics. Island isolation, both current and past, was associated with lower richness but greater endemism. Flight capacity modified the relative importance of past versus current isolation, with bats responding more strongly to current and non-volant mammals to past isolation. Environmental effects on ... : We derived a global database of mammalian insular biodiversity by using the Global Administrative areas version 3.6 (GADM, 2018) to subset spatial polygons of all land masses smaller than Greenland (2,166,000 km²) that are surrounded by salty water and overlapping it with the mammalian range maps from IUCN (IUCN, 2017). We carefully inspected and manually corrected any other alignment inconsistencies using QGIS 3.6 (Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project, 2019). We opted for a highly conservative approach of excluding any island with the slightest doubt about species attribution and ignoring islands where no mammal species occurs according to the IUCN data (i.e., our dataset only includes islands with at least one species). For example, regions with clusters of nearby islands – e.g., Patagonia and Scandinavia. We removed introduced species from the database by excluding (1) species polygons recorded as introduced by IUCN and (2) species listed as invasive for each particular island in the Database of ... |
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