| | Navigate the Atlas:  | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| | | Island Ecosystems |
Maintained by NOAA
 |
| |
| | Types of island ecosystems | | |  An island is a body of land, smaller than a continent, completely surrounded by water. Plants and animals of island ecosystems have many distinctive features, often related to the type of island: - old continental islands e.g. New Caledonia and New Zealand, originally part of a continent
- oceanic islands, generally volcanic and short lived e.g. Hawaii
- coral atolls (see photo of Palmyra Atoll)
- small, numerous islands e.g. red mangrove islets in the tropics, sand islets of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, and
- barrier islands parallel and close to the mainland coast.
Palmyra Atoll, Pacific Ocean. Scripps scientists found the record of El Niño inside ancient corals washed onto this equatorial beach. Full story Photo courtesy Kim Cobb, Scripps Institution of Oceanography | | | | Island biogeography | | |  Island ecosystems have been studied because they are simpler than ocean ecosystems. Even clusters of islands are simpler to study. Islands provide natural “experiments” for research because of their number, variation in shape, size, degree of isolation and ecology. Oceanic islands near continents may have continental plants and animals. More isolated islands may have endemic species. One of the key relationships in island biogeography is the area-biodiversity curve. Generally the larger the island, the more diverse the plants and animals. To put it another way, environmental diversity is correlated with island area.
Bahia Azul, Panama, a great chaenopsid collecting site Photo: P A Hastings | | |  More recent interest in island biogeography has had an impact on conservation biology. Many features of island ecosystems are relevant to ecosystem conservation elsewhere, on land as well as in the oceans. Island ecosystems have helped our understanding of:- fragmentation (leading to insularization)
- creation of biotic communities, and
- species extinction.
Acanthemblemaria mangognatha, a recently described tube blenny endemic to Islas Revillagigedos, Mexico. Photo: D R Robertson | | | | |
 | | | | | Long-Term Effects of Oil Pollution More Significant Than Previously Believed
by Charles H. Peterson, SeaWeb 11 February 2004 | |
| | A paper in the journal Science has challenged the widely-held assumption that oil spills, such as the one that contaminated Alaska's Prince William Sound almost fifteen years ago, have only short-term impacts on coastal marine ecosystems. The review synthesized results of a series of studies of the impact of the March 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, and found, says lead author Charles H. Peterson of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that "oil has persisted in surprisingly large quantities for years ... in subsurface reservoirs under coarse intertidal sediments. This oil was sequestered in conditions where weathering by wave action, light and bacteria was inhibited, and toxicity remained for a decade or more." | |
Read more at http://www.seaweb.org/resources/74update/oil.html.
|
|
|
|
1076 Topics - 5135 Related Knowledge - 2534 Members - 34 Editors |
