A faculty member from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo has a recent study on flora of the Canary Island of Tenerife featured in the July 12, 2023 issue of Nature.
Dr. Jonathan Price, professor of geography, is part of an international research team and co-author of “Assembly of functional diversity in an oceanic island flora,” which examines and compares Tenerife’s plant-life to that of mainland plants. The researchers investigated how the plants of Tenerife differ in functional terms from plants from other parts of the world. The team is led by the University of Gottingen, Gottingen, Germany.
“Like Hawai'i, the Canary Islands represent an isolated volcanic archipelago, with numerous unique endemic species,” Price noted. “The paper involves considering the functional traits of plants on the Island of Tenerife in the context of plants worldwide, and how they evolved in the islands.
“This work stems from a long collaboration among island-focused researchers across numerous countries,” he added.
“Our study shows, for the first time and contrary to all expectations, that species groups that evolved on the Canary Islands do not contribute to the expansion of the breadth of different traits,” explained the lead of the study, Professor Holger Kreft, and Göttingen University’s Biodiversity, Macroecology and Biogeography research group. “This means they do not lead to more functional diversity.”
“At the beginning of our research, we assumed that island plants would show fundamental differences and would be characterised by rather limited diversity in terms of function due to their geographical isolation,” said first author Dr. Paola Barajas Barbosa, University of Göttingen, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. “We were all the more surprised to find that the plants of Tenerife have a comparatively high functional diversity.”
Other co-authors include: Dylan Craven, Universidad Mayor, Data Observatory Foundation; Patrick Weigel, University of Göttingen; Pierre Denelle, University of Göttingen; Rüdiger Otto, Universidad de La Laguna; Sandra Díaz, Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal (IMBIV), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; and José María Fernández-Palacios, Universidad de La Laguna.
The paper is available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06305-z.