BayCEER Workshop 2008

Patterns of Species Diversity on the Canarian Island Archipelago

The Canary Islands are a place of pilgrimage for ecologists since the time of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin. Even if still there is some debate on the taxonomic status of some endemic species, there exists an excellent quality of biotic data that can be used for biogeographical analyses. The special situation that the source species pool of the African continent went quantitatively extinct due to climate change during the Holocene, is a remarkable fact that distinguishes the situation from many other island floras and faunas. Here, we tackle general theories of island biogeography using data sets of various groups of organisms.