Avian Dispersal Ability Shapes Species-Area Relationships on Islands Worldwide.

Island biogeography theory provides key insights into biodiversity patterns across islands species-area relationships and conservation. However, classical island biogeography theory assumes that species are ecologically equivalent in terms of their dispersal ability. We evaluated the role of a key trait (hand-wing index, a proxy for dispersal ability in birds) in shaping species-area relationships of avifauna spanning 6706 species on 3894 islands. High community-weighted mean (CWM) dispersal ability in regional species pools had widespread but context-dependent effects on island species-area relationships. Among island archipelagos at smaller spatial extents, high CWM dispersal ability was associated with steeper species-area relationships. Among zoogeographical realms at larger spatial extents high CWM dispersal ability was associated with shallower species-area relationships and higher local species richness on small islands. Our study reveals that geographic variation in species' dispersal traits has strong effects on island species-area relationships and likely plays an important role in non-neutral community assembly.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  Ecology Letters

• Publication date

  2024-11-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/ele.70020PMID 39623737
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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