Species abundance distributions (SADs) characterise the distribution of individuals among species. This dataset was used to investigate the relative importance of disturbance regime (tropical cyclone regime) and island geography (the area and isolation of islands) on the shape of SADs.

Tree species abundance data (i.e., the number of individuals for each tree species within a community), was obtained for 51 1-ha plots in humid tropical forests on 20 islands (13 archipelagos) in the Indo-Pacific region. Only plots without any evidence of recent natural or anthropogenic disturbances were conisidred (e.g., secondary forest plots, as defined by the author of source data, were removed). In each plot, all trees with a stem diameter ≥ 10 cm at c. 1.3 m above the base (DBH, diameter at breast height) were identified. All plots were located in lowland forests on islands larger than 1 km². For each plot the number of trees (N), the number of tree species (R), and the shape parameter α of the gambin model (which characterize the shape of species abundance distributions, SADs) were computed. Standaridized R (R_stand)  and α (α_stand) were also computed by randomly subsampling 400 trees per plot before counting the number of species and fitting gambin models. This process was repeated 100 times for each plot before estimating R_stand and α_stand as the mean value of R_i and α_i from all iterations. Island area (Area) and isolation (Dist) were extracted from the Island Directory (http://islands.unep.ch), mean annual temperature (MAT) and mean annual precipitation (MAP) were extracted for each plot location from CHELSA (http://chelsa-climate.org/) and a power dissipation index (PDI), a proxy of the energy released by cyclones, was computed using  the IBTrACs database (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ibtracs/, see Knapp, Kruk, Levinson).