Abstract
The term meta-archipelago has been in use in cultural studies for some time, to refer to certain complex island areas in which the boundaries between conventionally recognised archipelagos are indistinct, although the concept also carries additional connotations. Use of the term in biogeography appears more recent and without effort to prescribe its meaning. We outline, from a biogeographical perspective, distinctions between meta-archipelagos and archipelagos and those islands not occurring within either collective grouping, highlighting that network analysis tools provide metrics for formal analytical purposes.
Highlights
The etymology of the word archipelago points to a derivation linked to the Italian arcipelago as a name for the Aegean (Fig. 1)
In complex island regions such as the Caribbean or South-East Asia (Sunda Islands, New Guinea, Philippines) and parts of the South Pacific/Polynesia, it is often debatable where one archipelago ends and another begins (Benítez Rojo and Maraniss 1985, above). This matters in island biogeography as many of our analyses are based on data sets structured into archipelagos (e.g., Bunnefeld and Phillimore 2012)
For some purposes island biologists are engaged in studying process and pattern at the intra-island level, while for other purposes it is the inter-island patterns within the archipelago that are the focus of interest and analysis (e.g., Whittaker et al 2017, Price et al 2018)
Summary
The etymology of the word archipelago points to a derivation linked to the Italian arcipelago as a name for the Aegean (principal sea) (Fig. 1). Persistent and well isolated systems, the meta-archipelago may be equivalent to a biogeographical sub-region or perhaps to a biogeographical network, but the concept may be applied to groups of entities within smaller, impermanent and less isolated systems, such as constellations of habitat islands.
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