Five members of the IBBC-cE3c research group have contributed to a review paper recently published in the Biological Reviews journal. The authors form collectively the international research group BIG – Biodynamics in Islands Group, an international consortium interested in island biogeography and the dynamics of species diversity.

The paper reviews literature from the last decade and focuses on the dynamic geological platform of oceanic islands and how it affects the processes of ecology and evolution. Its main focus is on the General Dynamic Model of Oceanic Island Biogeography (GDM). Since it was published in 2008, the GDM spurred renewed interest on research on the dynamics of remote islands, because for the first time it recognized that geological processes are key drivers of the evolutionary processes of diversification within remote islands.

This review paper identifies outstanding current research questions and potentially productive lines for future research and, as such, it constitutes a valuable resource for MSc and PhD students in island biogeography.

On the left, a conceptual depiction of the temporal trajectory of key aspects of diversity, modified by Borregaard et al. (2016) from Whittaker et al. (2007, 2008), which corresponds to Figure 1-A of the present paper. I ,immigration rate; S, speciation rate; E, extinction rate; K , carrying capacity; R, species richness. I , S and E are island-level rates. 

Borregaard, M. K., Amorim, I. R., Borges, P. A. V., Cabral, J. S., Fernández-Palacios, J. M., Field, R., Heaney, L. R., Kreft, H., Matthews, T. J., Olesen, J. M., Price, J., Rigal, F., Steinbauer, M. J., Triantis, K. A., Valente, L., Weigelt, P. and Whittaker, R. J. (2016), Oceanic island biogeography through the lens of the general dynamic model: assessment and prospect. Biological Reviews. Online early. doi: 10.1111/brv.12256