Global diversity of island floras from a macroecological perspective

Kreft, Holger; Jetz, Walter; Mutke, Jens; Kier, Gerold; Barthlott, Wilhelm

doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2007.01129.x

Cited by 307 publications

(337 citation statements)

References 53 publications

(121 reference statements)

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“…This dataset is described in more detail elsewhere Kreft & Jetz 2007) and full references of all sources are given in Kier et al (2005). Because island-specific factors such as geographical isolation and immigration-extinction dynamics shape floras and faunas (Kreft et al 2008), we excluded oceanic islands to facilitate inference. In order to minimize false presences of vertebrate species, we excluded geographical units below 10 000 km 2 in size, the minimum size at which mammal and bird range map data are expected to be reliable (Hurlbert & Jetz 2007), which resulted in a final list of 639 geographical units.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global associations between terrestrial producer and vertebrate consumer diversity

et al. 2008

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In both ecology and conservation, often a strong positive association is assumed between the diversity of plants as primary producers and that of animals, specifically primary consumers. Such a relationship has been observed at small spatial scales, and a begetting of diversity by diversity is expected under various scenarios of co-evolution and co-adaptation. But positive producer-consumer richness relationships may also arise from similar associations with past opportunities for diversification or contemporary environmental conditions, or from emerging properties of plant diversity such as vegetation complexity or productivity. Here we assess whether the producer-consumer richness relationship generalizes from plot to regional scale and provide a first global test of its strength for vascular plants and endothermic vertebrates. We find strong positive richness associations, but only limited congruence of the most diverse regions. The richness of both primary and higher-level consumers increases with plant richness at similar strength and rate. Environmental conditions emerge as much stronger predictors of consumer richness, and after accounting for environmental differences little variation is explained by plant diversity. We conclude that biotic interactions and strong local associations between plants and consumers only relatively weakly scale up to broad geographical scales and to functionally diverse taxa, for which environmental constraints on richness dominate.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global associations between terrestrial producer and vertebrate consumer diversity

et al. 2008

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“…S3). The very high values of endemism richness on islands are especially noteworthy because species richness on islands is generally lower than on mainland sites with comparable climate (20,36). Island floras and faunas are usually recognized to maintain a high degree of endemism because of their geographic isolation and the limited interchange with neighboring mainland or island biota.…”

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confidence: 99%

A global assessment of endemism and species richness across island and mainland regions

Kier

Kreft

Lee

et al. 2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Endemism and species richness are highly relevant to the global prioritization of conservation efforts in which oceanic islands have remained relatively neglected. When compared to mainland areas, oceanic islands in general are known for their high percentage of endemic species but only moderate levels of species richness, prompting the question of their relative conservation value. Here we quantify geographic patterns of endemism-scaled richness (''endemism richness'') of vascular plants across 90 terrestrial biogeographic regions, including islands, worldwide and evaluate their congruence with terrestrial vertebrates. Endemism richness of plants and vertebrates is strongly related, and values on islands exceed those of mainland regions by a factor of 9.5 and 8.1 for plants and vertebrates, respectively. Comparisons of different measures of past and future human impact and land cover change further reveal marked differences between mainland and island regions. While island and mainland regions suffered equally from past habitat loss, we find the human impact index, a measure of current threat, to be significantly higher on islands. Projected land-cover changes for the year 2100 indicate that land-use-driven changes on islands might strongly increase in the future. Given their conservation risks, smaller land areas, and high levels of endemism richness, islands may offer particularly high returns for species conservation efforts and therefore warrant a high priority in global biodiversity conservation in this century.biodiversity ͉ conservation ͉ human impact ͉ terrestrial vertebrates ͉ vascular plants W orldwide loss of biodiversity requires global conservation priority setting to channel limited international conservation resources to regions of highest conservation value and need for action (1-5). Approaches for using biological data as a component of priority setting vary but can largely be divided into (i) algorithmbased assessments such as minimum-area sets or gap analyses (2, 6-8) and (ii) index-based assessments using indices such as endemism or species richness as surrogates for the conservation value of a region (1, 4, 9). While many theoretical arguments underpin the strengths of algorithm-based assessments (2, 8, 10, 11), they require detailed distribution data that are only available for few taxonomic groups-almost exclusively terrestrial vertebrates (6, 9, 12-15), on which systematic conservation planning has thus relied increasingly in the past years. Such detailed data are not available for the vast majority of taxonomic groups on the global scale including vascular plants. Although great effort is being made in digitizing existing data from natural history collections for conservation purposes (16, 17), biodiversity loss is arguably proceeding more rapidly than the documentation of species distributions. Hence, an inventory-based approach, which forms a main basis for the present study, is a workable solution if global conservation planning is to be informed by vascular plants (18), a group of o...

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“…Species richness is principally determined by an island's size, its degree of geographical isolation, and present climatic conditions (Kreft et al 2008). Unfortunately, island biotas are now seriously threatened by habitat losses and climate change, and are particularly sensitive to biological invasions (Serafini et al 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

<div>Floristic diversity of the Cagarras Islands Natural Monument, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil</div>

Bovini

Faria²,

Oliveira

et al. 2014

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The vascular flora was inventoried of the Cagarras Islands Natural Monument (CINM) located offshore of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a total of 171 species were encountered. The families with the greatest richnesses were: Asteraceae (12 spp.), Myrtaceae (12), Fabaceae (11), Bromeliaceae (7), Cactaceae (6), Euphorbiaceae (6), and Poaceae (6). The regional vegetation was similar to restinga, although high concentrations of guano from nesting marine birds affected diversity on two islands. The threatened species Gymanthes nervosa Müll. Arg. was recorded from the municipality of Rio de Janeiro for the first time since the 1940s.

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Global diversity of island floras from a macroecological perspective

Cited by 307 publications

References 53 publications

Global associations between terrestrial producer and vertebrate consumer diversity

Global associations between terrestrial producer and vertebrate consumer diversity

A global assessment of endemism and species richness across island and mainland regions

<div>Floristic diversity of the Cagarras Islands Natural Monument, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil</div>

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