TIL20: A review of island biogeography and habitat fragmentation studies on subtropical reservoir islands of Thousand Island Lake, China

Reservoir islands formed by dam construction have the same history, clear boundaries, and large numbers that provide a natural platform for testing theories in ecology and biogeography. In this paper, we review studies of multiple zoological taxa on reservoir islands of a large lake in eastern China (Thousand Island Lake). This lake, created in 1959, has 1 078 artificial land-bridge islands of varying areas and isolation. Our review summarizes the decades-long studies in island biogeography and habitat fragmentation from this island system, grouped into three topics: species richness (“how many species are there”), community structure (“who are they”), and species interaction (“how they interact with each other”). Our findings support the predictions of the Equilibrium Theory of Island Biogeography and extend this theory to predict community structure of island faunas by moving beyond assumptions of species equivalency. In addition, the extensive studies on ecological networks, including mutualistic, antagonistic, and parasitic interactions, reveal the negative impacts of habitat loss on the maintenance of such networks, even as increasing forest edge enhances the robustness of pollination networks. At the end of this review, we proposed several future research directions based on current studies that are simultaneously at the frontier of ecology and biogeography.