Abstract
Islands have been natural laboratories for studying biodiversity ever since Darwin visited the Galápagos. The importance of islands for biological research is two-fold: they are the setting of nature’s most spectacular adaptive radiations (“cradles of speciation”) and are at the frontline of today’s biodiversity crisis (“anthropogenic extinction hotspots”). To understand how island biotas have emerged and will change in the future, we must consider speciation and anthropogenic extinction in an integrated framework. However, currently there are theoretical and empirical obstacles to this. Existing evolutionary models cannot be applied at global scales or to islands with complex geological histories, precluding general insights. Furthermore, we lack comprehensive island phylogenetic datasets that include both living and extinct species. I will develop a new integrative framework for island biogeography simultaneously considering evolutionary diversification and anthropogenic extinction. It will be the first island phylogenetic approach applicable at multiple scales (local to global) and to all types of islands. The method will be applied to newly-generated phylogenetic and genomic datasets for insular communities, including extant and extinct taxa, focusing on animals (birds and mammals) and daisies (the plant family that has speciated the most on islands). I will reconstruct the pattern of species accumulation on multiple islands in order to i) understand how island features and ecological interactions regulate species diversification on a global scale and ii) evaluate the past and predicted evolutionary impact of anthropogenic extinctions by measuring how long it would take for islands to recover to their natural state. All methods developed will be implemented in user-friendly software. The results on time to recover lost island diversity will be used as a new metric for conservation prioritization on islands. The project will provide a baseline phylogenetic framework for studying evolutionary dynamics in isolated environments in the Anthropocene.
Netherlands