Outbreaks of fossorial arvicoline rodents have plagued temperate European farmlands throughout history, causing large-scale crop loss and forming reservoirs for zoonotic pathogens. Industrialisation of agricultural practices has led to an increase of agricultural field sizes in Europe, coinciding with the removal of ecological structural elements (ESE) such as hedgerows, tree lines, and bushes. This has promoted both the proba...

Water table management such as temporal flooding is an important strategy for influencing vegetation development and creating suitable habitat for wildlife in managed wetland systems. Water table fluctuations can also affect soil carbon and nutrient cycling through changes in abiotic soil properties, plant traits and soil microbial communities, but research on the effect of temporal flooding on these relations is limited. Here...

Motivation Historical changes in sea level caused shifting coastlines that affected the distribution and evolution of marine and terrestrial biota. At the onset of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) 26 ka, sea levels were >130 m lower than at present, resulting in seaward‐shifted coastlines and shallow shelf seas, with emerging land bridges leading to the isolation of marine biota and the connection of land‐bridge islands to the c...

Aim Mountains and islands are both well known for their high endemism. To explain this similarity, parallels have been drawn between the insularity of “true islands” (land surrounded by water) and the isolation of habitats within mountains (so‐called “mountain islands”). However, parallels rarely go much beyond the observation that mountaintops are isolated from one another, as are true islands. Here, we challenge the analogy...

Geographic isolation substantially contributes to species endemism on oceanic islands when speciation involves the colonisation of a new island. However, less is understood about the drivers of speciation within islands. What is lacking is a general understanding of the geographic scale of gene flow limitation within islands, and thus the spatial scale and drivers of geographical speciation within insular contexts. Using a com...

Aim Our objective is to analyse global‐scale patterns of mountain biodiversity and the driving forces leading to the observed patterns. More specifically, we test the ‘mountain geobiodiversity hypothesis’ (MGH) which is based on the assumption that it is not mountain‐uplift alone which drives the evolution of mountain biodiversity, but rather the combination of geodiversity evolution and Neogene and Pleistocene climate changes...

Aim To quantify the influence of past archipelago configuration on present‐day insular biodiversity patterns, and to compare the role of long‐lasting archipelago configurations over the Pleistocene to configurations of short duration such as at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the present‐day. Location 53 volcanic oceanic islands from 12 archipelagos worldwide—Azores, Canary Islands, Cook Islands, Galápagos, Gulf of Guinea,...

Motivation Past sea level fluctuations have shaped island area and archipelago configuration. The availability of global high‐resolution data on bathymetry and past sea levels allows reconstruction of island palaeo‐geography. Studies on the role of palaeo‐area often consider only the Last Glacial Maximum, which neglects the dynamics of island fusion and fission resulting from cyclic sea level fluctuations throughout the Quater...

How do organisms arrive on isolated islands, and how do insular evolutionary radiations arise? In a recent paper, Wilmé et al . ( ) argue that early Austronesians that colonized Madagascar from Southeast Asia translocated giant tortoises to islands in the western Indian Ocean. In the Mascarene Islands, moreover, the human‐translocated tortoises then evolved and radiated in an endemic genus ( Cylindraspis ). Their proposal igno...

Although the role that P leistocene glacial cycles have played in shaping the present biota of oceanic islands world‐wide has long been recognized, their geographical, biogeographical and ecological implications have not yet been fully incorporated within existing biogeographical models. Here we summarize the different types of impacts that glacial cycles may have had on oceanic islands, including cyclic changes in climate, sh...

The study of islands as model systems has played an important role in the development of evolutionary and ecological theory. The 50th anniversary of MacArthur and Wilson's (December 1963) article, ‘An equilibrium theory of insular zoogeography’, was a recent milestone for this theme. Since 1963, island systems have provided new insights into the formation of ecological communities. Here, building on such developments, we highl...

Aim We assessed the biogeographical implications of Pleistocene sea‐level fluctuations on the surface area of Macaronesian volcanic oceanic islands. We quantified the effects of sea‐level cycles on surface area over 1000‐year intervals. Using data from the Canarian archipelago, we tested whether changes in island configuration since the late Pleistocene explain species distribution patterns. Location Thirty‐one islands of four...

Rotherslade on the Gower Peninsula in south Wales has been viewed as a key site for the reconstruction of Quaternary depositional environments in the British Isles. Since the early 20th century, and certainly since the 1980s, the accepted view has been that Rotherslade is the most westerly location on the south Gower coast where there is in situ basal till exposed and that, logically, this location marks the position of the LG...

Lithostratigraphical and lithofacies approaches used to interpret glacial sediments often ignore deformation structures that can provide the key to environment of formation. We propose a classification of deformation styles based on the geometry of structures rather than inferred environment of formation. Five styles are recognised: pure shear (P), simple shear (S), compressional (C), vertical (V) and undeformed (U). These dic...

By analysing a series of four successive thin‐sections from a ceramic clay that was subjected to uniaxial compression, we were able to monitor the development of microstructures in a fine‐grained sediment. The artificially induced microstructures, such as unidirectional clay reorientations and linear and circular grain arrangements, are identical to features that have been observed in thin‐sections of subglacially deformed til...