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| Island biogeography has greatly contributed to our understanding of the pro-
cesses determining species’ distributions. Previous research has focused on the
effects of island geography (i.e., island area, elevation, and isolation) and cur-
rent climate as drivers of island species richness and endemism. Here, we evalu-
ate the potential additional effects of historical climate on breeding land bird
richness and endemism in Wallacea and the West Indies. Furthermore, on the
basis of species distributions, we identify island biogeographical network roles
and examine their association with geography, current and historical climate,
and bird richness/endemism. We found that island geography, especially island
area but also isolation and elevation, largely explained the variation in island
species richness and endemism. Current and historical climate only added mar-
ginally to our understanding of the distribution of species on islands, and this
was idiosyncratic to each archipelago. In the West Indies, endemic richness was
slightly reduced on islands with historically unstable climates; weak support for
the opposite was found in Wallacea. In both archipelagos, large islands with
many endemics and situated far from other large islands had high importance
for the linkage within modules, indicating that these islands potentially act as
speciation pumps and source islands for surrounding smaller islands within the
module and, thus, define the biogeographical modules. Large islands situated
far from the mainland and/or with a high number of nonendemics acted as
links between modules. Additionally, in Wallacea, but not in the West Indies,
climatically unstable islands tended to interlink biogeographical modules. The
weak and idiosyncratic effect of historical climate on island richness, endemism,
and network roles indicates that historical climate had little effects on extinc-
tion-immigration dynamics. This is in contrast to the strong effect of historical
climate observed on the mainland, possibly because surrounding oceans buffer
against strong climate oscillations and because geography is a strong determi-
nant of island richness, endemism and network roles | |
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