Species-area relation for birds of the Solomon Archipelago

Abstract

Accurate values of number of breeding bird species have been obtained for 50 islands of the Solomon Archipelago. From information about species altitudinal distributions on each island, the values are apportioned into number of montane species (S(mt)) and of species present at sea-level (S(low)). S(low) increases linearly with the logarithm of island area A over a million-fold range of areas (correlation coefficient 0.99) and with a comparatively low slope, while the log S-log A relation is markedly curved. With increasing isolation of an archipelago, the species-area relation decreases in slope and may shift in form from a power function to an exponential. Comparison of Pacific archipelagoes at different distances from the colonization source of New Guinea shows that the decrease in slope is due to increasing intra-archipelago immigration rates, arising from overrepresentation of the most vagile inter-archipelago immigrants in more distant archipelagoes. When colonists are sorted into sets correlated with their dispersal abilities, the slope of the species-area relation for the most vagile set is close to zero, but for the least vagile set is close to the value predicted by Preston for "isolated universes."