14 documents found, page 1 of 2

Original plant diversity and ecosystems of a small, remote oceanic island (Corv...

Remote islands harbour many endemic species and unique ecosystems. They are also some of the world's most human-impacted systems. It is essential to understand how island species and ecosystems behaved prior to major anthropogenic disruption as a basis for their conservation. This research aims to reconstruct the original, pre-colonial biodiversity of a remote oceanic island to understand the scale of past exti...

Is there solid evidence of widespread landscape disturbance in the Azores befor...

Raposeiro et al. conclude that human occupation of the Azores islands began between 700 and 850 CE, causing widespread landscape disturbance and raising doubts about the islands’ presumed pristine nature when the Portuguese arrived. However, previous paleoecological studies from Flores, Pico, and Sao Miguel Islands (Table 1) show that permanent changes in the vegetation occurred only after the early 15th centur...

Is there solid evidence of widespread landscape disturbance in the Azores befor...

Dispersal syndromes are poorly associated with climatic niche differences in th...

AIM: Environmental niche tracking is linked to the species ability to disperse. While well investigated on large spatial scales, dispersal constraints also influence small-scale processes and may explain the difference between the potential and the realized niche of species at small scales. Here we test whether niche size and niche fill differ systematically according to dispersal syndrome within isolated ocean...

Macaronesia as a Fruitful Arena for Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology

Research in Macaronesia has led to substantial advances in ecology, evolution and conservation biology. We review the scientific developments achieved in this region, and outline promising research avenues enhancing conservation. Some of these discoveries indicate that the Macaronesian flora and fauna are composed of rather young lineages, not Tertiary relicts, predominantly of European origin. Macaronesia also...

Dispersal syndromes are poorly associated with climatic niche differences in th...

Aim: Environmental niche tracking is linked to the species ability to disperse. While well investigated on large spatial scales, dispersal constraints also influence small-scale processes and may explain the difference between the potential and the realized niche of species at small scales. Here we test whether niche size and niche fill differ systematically according to dispersal syndrome within isolated ocean...

Macaronesia as a fruitful arena for ecology, evolution and conservation biology

Research in Macaronesia has led to substantial advances in ecology, evolution and conservation biology. We review the scientific developments achieved in this region, and outline promising research avenues enhancing conservation. Some of these discoveries indicate that the Macaronesian flora and fauna are composed of rather young lineages, not Tertiary relicts, predominantly of European origin. Macaronesia also...

Colonization and diversification shape species-area relationships in three Maca...

Aim: Species–area relationships (SARs) on oceanic archipelagos are shaped at least as much by speciation as by immigration–extinction dynamics. We examine three well‐studied Atlantic archipelagos to quantify the relative contributions of coloniza tion and diversification to individual and whole‐archipelago floras. Location: Three Macaronesian archipelagos: the Azores, Madeira and Canary Islands. Methods: We ass...

The importance of generalist pollinator complexes for endangered island endemic...

To investigate whether endangered endemic plants of the Azores are threatened by pollinator limitation, we studied the insect pollinator communities of Azorina vidalii, Euphrasia azorica, Myosotis azorica and Solidago azorica on Corvo Island. We found no evidence for dependence on a specialised pollinator. Instead, we found five to 21 mostly generalist insect pollinators per plant species, six of them probably ...

Bees of the Azores : an annotated checklist (Apidae, Hymenoptera)

We report 18 species of wild bees plus the domesticated honeybee from the Azores, which adds nine species to earlier lists. One species, Hylaeus azorae, seems to be a single island endemic, and three species are possibly native (Colletes eous, Halictus villosulus, and Hylaeus pictipes). All the remaining bee species are most likely accidental introductions that arrived after human colonization of the archipelag...