Old botanical surveys help researchers track how plants on Australia’s islands are changing

More than 8,000 continental islands sit away from the coast of Australia, many of them are deserted and unpounted. For thousands of species, these patch of habitat give shelter on the mainland with those dangers.

Coastal islands are also a valuable resource for ecologists who study how plants colonize new houses and change over time.

Now, we have created a new publicly available database that is known A-IlandsThose who are attracted to decades of plant surveys (where botanists go to a particular place and record plants found there).

This unique collection of surveys is based on data about more than 6,500 plant species from over 850 islands. Some giant islands were spread to kilometers, while others were small as a small apartment.

Our new researchpublished in Botany journalAustralia’s coastal islands provide new insights on how to turn over time, and can help in plant monitoring and conservation efforts in the form of climate.

Scaling standing rocks, jumping from helicopters

We created A-Isalland by digitizing plant surveys from old books and records digitally, and speaking with botanists and organizations across Australia.

The A-Islands is made up of 1,350 island vegetation surveys, dating back in the 1940s from more than 135 different sources. We are still adding more.

The stories of how the data was collected was attractive. In some cases, people camped on the islands for weeks, making sure they can record every living organism.

Some small boats jumped from the helicopters to stand by rocks or even remote islands, and recorded the plants found there.

Australian island punch over their weight

As we competed with surveys, we realized that Australia’s coastal islands were punching their weight for the variety of species.

Despite making Australia’s land area less than 1%, at least 25% of Australian plants live in these coastal islands.

These arelands have almost diverse climate, with coral atol in the tropical north Queensland, the cold and winds are spread to the southern end of Tasmania in the rocky islands.

While some species of plants have colonized hundreds of Australian islands, most of them live in just a few islands.

These plant community islands are the backbone of ecosystems and provide havan for many endangered animals.

A rare resource for scientists

Many of the islands depicted in A-Island have been surveyed more than once in the last 100 years.

Most data of ecological science offer a snapshot in the time of species that can occur at a place.

Conversely, A-Ilands can tell us how Plants have changed for decades,

This is surprisingly rare in ecological studies, but if scientists are required to predict the future vegetation changes as climate change.

A new idea

Many people consider plant communities as stable and irreversible.

However, the A-Islends suggests that on these small coastal islands, the mainland species are migrating to the island, persist for a time, and then extinct and are being replaced by other species.

This concept of constantly changing species at a particular place is called species turnover. In theory, the types of species in an island community will change over time, but the number of species is the same, the same in the long term.

The data in A-Islands not only confirms that it has occurred in an unprecedented number of archipelago, but also suggests a new idea: some types of species “turnover” faster than others.

Species such as grass and small herbs come more often from the islands than long-lasting species.

Islands can be climate refuses

Data sets such as A-Isalland will become even more necessary as climate change. The islands are at the forefront of biodiversity loss, and Known global plant more than half of extinction Has been on islands.

It will be important to predict these underlying trends in community changes of species to predict how plant community replies to climate change everywhere in the coming centuries.

These islands will be important climate refuses, which are buffer from the hottest temperature by the surrounding ocean and are protected from the pressure of the mainland. They will be the housing of the important plant in the future.

A-Islands dataset makes an important base to define which species has resided in our ancient island environment over time.

It can also help scientists to work where they will need to do climate change to prioritize surveys.

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