Island Biogeography

Island biogeography is a field within biogeography that examines the factors that affect the species richness of isolated natural communities. The theory was developed to explain species richness of actual islands. It has since been extended to mountains surrounded by deserts, lakes surrounded by dry land, fragmented forest and even natural habitats surrounded by human-altered landscapes. Now it is used in reference to any ecosystem surrounded by unlike ecosystems. The field was started in the 1960s by the ecologists Robert MacArthur and E.O. Wilson, who coined the term island biogeography, as this theory attempted to predict the number of species that would exist on a newly created island.