NDLI: Bioclimatic and physical characterization of the world’s islands

Content Provider	PubMed Central
Author	Weigelt, Patrick Walter, Jetz Kreft, Holger
Abstract	The Earth’s islands harbor a distinct, yet highly threatened, biological and cultural diversity that has been shaped by geographic isolation and unique environments. Island systems are key natural laboratories for testing theory in ecology and evolution. However, despite their potential usefulness for research, a quantitative description of island environments and an environmental classification are still lacking. Here, we prepare a standardized dataset and perform a comprehensive global environmental characterization for 17,883 of the world’s marine islands >1 km2 (∼98% of total island area). We consider area, temperature, precipitation, seasonality in temperature and precipitation, past climate change velocity, elevation, isolation, and past connectivity—key island characteristics and drivers of ecosystem processes. We find that islands are significantly cooler, wetter, and less seasonal than mainlands. Constrained by their limited area, they show less elevational heterogeneity. Wet temperate climates are more prevalent on islands, whereas desert climates are comparatively rare. We use ordination and clustering to characterize islands in multidimensional environmental space and to delimit island ecoregions, which provides unique insights into the environmental configuration and diversity of the world’s islands. Combining ordination and classification together with global environmental data in a common framework opens up avenues for a more integrative use of islands in biogeography, macroecology, and conservation. To showcase possible applications of the presented data, we predict vascular plant species richness for all 17,883 islands based on statistically derived environment–richness relationships.
Related Links	http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1306309110
Ending Page	15312
Page Count	6
Starting Page	15307
File Format	PDF
ISSN	10916490
e-ISSN	10916490
Journal	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Issue Number	38
Volume Number	110
Language	English
Publisher	National Academy of Sciences
Publisher Date	2013-09-17
Access Restriction	Open
Rights Holder	National Academy of Sciences
Subject Keyword	Research in Higher Education
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Multidisciplinary

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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Correction for Weigelt et al., Bioclimatic and physical characterization of the world’s islands

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