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Trabajo presentado en el II International Conference on Island Evolution, Ecology and Conservation, celebrado en Angra do Heroísmo, Islas Azores (Portugal) del 18 al 22 de julio de 2016., In this talk I will present results from an on going collaborative project to characterise community structure within forest biomes of the Azores, Mascarene Islands and the Canary Islands. Standardised inventories have been carried out for plant communities within forests, and community composition for three arthropod groups is been quantified using a combination of ecological and molecular sampling protocols. Invertebrates have been sampled from 10 biodiversity plots distributed across historically continuous forest within single islands within each of the three archipelagos. Spiders and beetles have been chosen for the analysis of arthropods primarily associated with above-ground habitat, and DNA sequencing has been employed to facilitate both the delineation of probable biological species, and the estimation of genetic connectivity within species. Collembola have been chosen for the analysis of arthropods primarily associated with soils, using mitochondrial metagenomics to quantify species richness and diversity. A selection of recently obtained data will be used to demonstrate the practical and applied utility of this approach for the analysis and understanding of biological communities.

Trabajo presentado en la International Biogeography Society 7th Biennial Conference celebrada en Bayreuth (Alemania) del 8 al 12 de enero de 2015., The observation that ecological systems contain a small number of very abundant species and numerous relatively rare species is often described as one of only a few universal ecological laws. In this contribution we use standardized arthropod and vascular plant datasets from the Azores, Madeira, Canary Islands and La Reunion to investigate the impact island characteristics in species abundance distributions (SADs). We found that in Azores a large number of communities are bimodal, comprising very rare species (i.e. with low abundances) and relatively common species. Satellite taxa, introduced species and species that are more adapted to anthropogenic land surrounding the native forest tend to be found in lower abundances. More generally for all the archipelagos, we also found that SADs change as a function of species rarity and island age. In this respect, island identity is more important than trophic group in the properties of SADs. The consistent observed differences in the shape and parameters of island SAD models demonstrate that the study of relative species abundances is potentially useful in island biogeography

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