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| | | Island Ecosystems |
Maintained by NOAA
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| | 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. Hawai'i
- 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.
| | Photo title: Palmyra Atoll, Pacific Ocean | | Photo credit: 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. | | Photo title: Bahia Azul, Panama, a great chaenopsid collecting site | | Photo credit: P A Hastings, Scripps Institution of Oceanography | | |  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.
| | Photo title: Acanthemblemaria mangognatha, a new tube blenny endemic to Islas Revillagigedos, Mexico | | Photo credit: D R Robertson | | | | |
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| New Family of Atlantic Corals
by Aguilera, M, Scripps News 25 February 2004 | |
| | An international research team led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, has identified a family of corals found only in the Atlantic-a first for such classifications in that ocean-in a study that could transform the way corals are viewed and classified throughout the world. | |
Read more at http://scrippsnews.ucsd. ... e_num=621.
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