Abstract
Islands are ideal research models to study ecological processes, as they vary in size, ecological conditions, and have clearly defined boundaries. Despite great advances in island research, comprehensive understanding of numerous aspects in island ecology is still lacking. Open questions include the effects of spatial scale on island biodiversity, community assembly processes, and the diversity of species forms and functions on islands. Here, I review recent studies investigating species assembly processes and resulting diversity patterns on small islands at local and global scales. I discuss how small-island communities are shaped by environmental, population-level, and species-level processes that differ in strength with island area. Functional trait-based approaches better explained these patterns than measures of species richness on small islands. Detailed ecological understanding of community assembly processes on islands is of paramount importance to conserve biodiversity in an increasingly fragmented natural world.
Highlights
Islands constitute natural experiments to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses in spatially discrete arenas (Whittaker and Fernández-Palacios 2007)
At the regional scale, island communities are shaped by a combination of non-random assembly processes that differ in strength with island area and which are better explained by functional trait approaches than total measures of species richness
I tested which environmental factors determine species richness sampled at small spatial scales on the Raja Ampat islands, whether SARs constructed from species richness sampled at different spatial scales differ in shape and function and whether species richness sampled at small spatial scales inherently causes high species variability independent of island area, thereby mirroring a small island effect (SIE)-like pattern (Schrader et al 2019a)
Summary
Islands constitute natural experiments to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses in spatially discrete arenas (Whittaker and Fernández-Palacios 2007). At the regional scale, island communities are shaped by a combination of non-random assembly processes that differ in strength with island area and which are better explained by functional trait approaches than total measures of species richness.
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