Tracking the origin of island diversity: insights from divergence with the continental pool in monocots

Abstract

At their early age, a large proportion of island pools were a partial sampling of mainland pools whatever islands are oceanic or fragments of the mainland. Through time, colonization, diversification, extinctions, have deeply transformed insular and continental communities and therefore the degree to which they share species. We studied the relative importance of these mechanisms by looking at the shared evolutionary history between species pools on islands and continents. Indeed, most of these mechanisms are not neutral regarding phylogeny but are linked to species evolutionary relationships. We measured the phylogenetic divergence between continental and insular monocot communities through metrics of beta Mean Pairwise Distance and beta Mean Nearest Taxon Distance. We first tested the influence of spatial and environmental distance to the continent, two main factors of divergence, but whose explanatory power in a phylogenetic context was still unclear. We showed that both dispersal and enviromental filtering were important to explain divergence, although species that could pass these filters were not phylogenetically clustered. There was however a clear distinction between oceanic and continental islands: a stable climate in the latters was key to the survival of the original biota leading to a high proportion of shared lineages between the mainland and islands. But distance to the continent was only part of the story, we investigated additionnal mechanisms of phylogenetic divergence through their relation to island features and community structure. This showed that the most divergent islands occurred in the tropics and that processes of persistence of original species, diversification in remote archipelagos, neutral colonization on easy-to-reach islands, turnover, and high speciation rates may have driven phylogenetic divergence at a world scale. This study showed how phylogenetic approaches may explain how divergence, or similarity may have arisen and provide new insights in the continental origin of plant diversity on islands.