Assembly rules for island metacommunities

Abstract ‘Assembly rules for island metacommunities’ reviews the search for hidden tramlines in the composition of island biotas (i.e. non-random patterns that may carry biological meaning). It highlights three general challenges: the detection, attribution, and resolution problems. It describes Jared Diamond’s seminal studies of incidence functions, checkerboards, and related distributional patterns for Bismarck Island land birds. It reviews subsequent literature exploring the distinction between analyses restricted to ecological guilds and to broader groups or metacommunities and the roles of trophic hierarchies and of ecological networks. It reviews species incidence functions, nested distributions (where island biotas are proper subsets of successively richer islands), and beta diversity partitioning, each reflecting insular species’ responses to island properties. It describes functional and phylogenetic diversity metrics and their application to island biotas. It reviews longitudinal studies of island disassembly following disruption, and of island assembly, principally through data for Surtsey and the Krakatau Islands.