Species diversity can drive speciation

Brent C. Emerson () and Niclas Kolm
Additional contact information
Brent C. Emerson: University of East Anglia
Niclas Kolm: University of East Anglia

Nature, 2005, vol. 434, issue 7036, 1015-1017

Abstract: Speciation: the more the merrier Understanding why some areas of the Earth accommodate more species than others has long interested evolutionary ecologists and has practical implications for conservation biologists. Islands are the best places to study such things, and classical theory demonstrates that the number of species on an island is, among other things, related to the size of the island and its proximity to other islands. Emerson and Kolm have now identified another factor driving speciation: the number of species present in the first place. Analyses of the arthropod fauna and flowering plant flora of the Canary and Hawaiian Islands supports the new theory: the more species in a given area, the higher the probability of evolutionary change within those species.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03450 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:434:y:2005:i:7036:d:10.1038_nature03450

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature03450

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().