AIsland:
A vegetation dataset for biodiversity research and species monitoring on Australian islands
AIsland is a novel and unique database for plant occurrences on Australian islands. Utilising published species lists and floras, AIsland includes comprehensive species lists for 831 islands of different sizes and degrees of isolation, spanning all major Australian climate zones. AIsland contains information for repeated vegetation surveys on 255 islands (507 repeated surveys in total) from early 20th century to today providing a distinct opportunity to investigate temporal plant turnover dynamics; a crucial feature for understanding how vegetation changes over time and with global change in isolated and fragmented habitats.
The aim with AIsland longer-term is to facilitate collaborative research projects, e.g., investigating species turnover dynamics and community assembly on islands, or establishing long-term monitoring schemes to track species distributions and movements under global change. Further, this island-plant dataset has potential to be used for cross-taxa analyses when paired with occurrence data of other organisms such as birds, mammals or reptiles.
Data contributions, collaborations or intellectual input are welcome!
Paper:
Schrader, J., Wright, I. J., Kreft, H., Weigelt, P., Andrew, S. C., Abbott, I., & Westoby, M. (2022). ETIB‐T: An Equilibrium Theory of Island Biogeography for plant traits. Journal of Biogeography. doi: 10.1111/jbi.14526
Julian Schrader 