Author Description

The ecological and evolutionary aspects of island populations are both treated at length in this book, which combines natural history, biogeography, and a critical examination of theoretical concepts in ecology and evolution by the study of real examples. The book starts with features of island life, the nature of communities and of species on isolated islands considered against the background of the geological history of islands and of general biogeography. The two main sections of the book treat the numbers of species on islands and the evolutionary processes leading to new species. The final section is a tentative analysis of species interactions on islands.