BACKGROUND Ever since Darwin, natural scientists have turned to islands for inspiration
and for model systems. For the past half century, they have done so largely within the …

Islands are geographically defined as land masses completely surrounded by water, and
island systems have been used as models for many biogeographic, ecological, and …

Regressions and meta-regressions are widely used to estimate patterns and effect sizes in
various disciplines. However, many biological and medical analyses use relatively low …

Metacommunity ecology links smaller-scale processes that have been the provenance of
population and community ecology—such as birth-death processes, species interactions …

Aims The 50th anniversary of the publication of the seminal book, The Theory of Island
Biogeography, by Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson, is a timely moment to review …

Colonization, speciation and extinction are dynamic processes that influence global patterns
of species richness,,,,–. Island biogeography theory predicts that the contribution of these …

Microbes, similar to plants and animals, exhibit biogeographic patterns. However, in contrast
with the considerable knowledge on the island biogeography of higher organisms, we know …

Mega hydropower projects in tropical forests pose a major emergent threat to terrestrial and
freshwater biodiversity worldwide. Despite the unprecedented number of existing, under …

The species–area relationship (SAR) constitutes one of the most general ecological patterns
globally. A number of different SAR models have been proposed. Recent work has shown …

Numerous mechanisms have been proposed to explain the island species–area
relationship (ISAR), including the passive sampling effect, the habitat diversity effect …