Abstract
Understanding species' ability to colonize new habitats is a key knowledge allowing us to predict species' survival in the changing landscapes. However, most studies exploring this topic observe distribution of species in landscapes which are under strong human influence being fragmented only recently and ignore the fact that the species distribution in these landscapes is far from equilibrium. Oceanic islands seem more appropriate systems for studying the relationship between species traits and its distribution as they are fragmented without human contribution and as they remained unchanged for a long evolutionary time. In our study we compared the values of dispersal as well as persistence traits among 18 species pairs from the Canary Islands differing in their distribution within the archipelago. The data were analyzed both with and without phylogenetic correction. The results demonstrate that no dispersal trait alone can explain the distribution of the species in the system. They, however, also suggest that species with better dispersal compared to their close relatives are better colonizers. Similarly, abundance of species in the archipelago seems to be an important predictor of species colonization ability only when comparing closely related species. This implies that analyses including phylogenetic correction may provide different insights than analyses without such a correction and both types of analyses should be combined to understand the importance of various plant traits for species colonization ability.
Highlights
Species ability to disperse and colonize new habitats is a key prerequisite for their response to ongoing landscape and climate changes [1,2]
As a number of occupied islands itself can be a function of plant traits, we explored the life history traits associated with number of occupied islands
Species presence on El Hierro was significantly influenced by dispersal distance, seed mass, species longevity and by the number of islands occupied by the species (Table 2)
Summary
Species ability to disperse and colonize new habitats is a key prerequisite for their response to ongoing landscape and climate changes [1,2]. Many recent studies are attempting to understand the importance of species traits for species ability to colonize habitats of different size and isolation Most of these studies are done in various fragmented landscapes, predominantly in grasslands and forests Often these studies demonstrate that species distribution is determined by current landscape structure, but is largely a result of landscape structure in the past The traits driving species distribution on young habitat fragments in a changing landscape can be different from those in the landscapes fragmented for longer evolutionary time [15,16]
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