Aim

The Island Species-Area Relationship (ISAR) quantifies how the number of species increases as the area of an island or island-like habitat gets larger, and is one of ecology’s most general patterns. However, studies that measure the ISAR often confound variation in sampling methodology and analyses, precluding appropriate syntheses of its underlying mechanisms. While most ISAR studies only use presence-absence data at the whole-island scale, we aggregated data sets of species-level abundances allowing for individual-based rarefaction.

Location

505 islands from 34 different archipelagos across the world, including oceanic islands, lake islands and forest islands.

Major Taxa Studied

Local assemblages of plants, invertebrates, herpetofauna, birds, mammals

Suitable data sets were searched for on online databases. Species lists and abundances per island were extracted and organised in tables, one per data set (author-name_year). Island area, coordinates, elevation and additional sampling design information were also gathered from the articles. When area, elevation or coordinates were missing, several sources were used to retrieve them as noted in env_file_utf8.csv.

All independent data sets were then aggregated in one long format table for further analysis, see the Zenodo archive associated to this data set for the R code.

See the article associated to the data set for a description of the standardisation process.