‘St Helena, an island between’: Multiple migrations, small island resilience, and survival

The Survival of Easter Island: Dwindling Resources and Cultural Resilience

In November 1992, the British historian Clive Ponting gave a lecture to a jam-packed auditorium at Groningen University about his book A Green History of the World , which had been translated into Dutch soon after its publication the previous year. 1 The book had made a deep impression because of its unique perspective: previous accounts of world history had been told from the viewpoint of king...

Small Island States

Small island biogeography in the Gulf of California: lizards, the subsidized island biogeography hypothesis, and the small island effect

Aim We used insular lizard communities to test the predictions of two hypotheses that attempt to explain patterns of species richness on small islands. We first address the subsidized island biogeography (SIB) hypothesis, which predicts that spatial subsidies may cause insular species richness to deviate from species–area predictions, especially on small islands. Next, we examine the small isla...

Health, climate and small island states

Butterfly survival on an isolated island by improved grip.

On small isolated islands, natural selection is expected to reduce the dispersal capacity of organisms, as short distances do not require a high rate of dispersal, which might lead to accidental emigration from the population. In addition, individuals foregoing the high cost of maintaining flight capacity may instead allocate resources to other functions. However, in butterflies and many other ...