Abstract

Biodiversity patterns emerge as a consequence of evolutionary and ecological processes. Their relative importance is frequently tested on model ecosystems such as oceanic islands that vary in both. However, the coarse-scale data typically used in biogeographic studies have limited inferential power to separate the effects of historical biogeographic factors (e.g., island age) from the effects of ecological ones (e.g., island area and habitat heterogeneity). Here, we describe local-scale biodiversity patterns of woody plants using a database of more than 500 forest plots from across the Hawaiian archipelago, where these volcanic islands differ in age by several million years. We show that, after controlling for factors such as island area and heterogeneity, the oldest islands (Kaua’i and O’ahu) have greater native species diversity per unit area than younger islands (Maui and Hawai’i), indicating an important role for macroevolutionary processes in driving not just whole-island differences in species diversity, but also local community assembly. Further, we find that older islands have a greater number of rare species that are more spatially clumped (i.e., higher within-island β-diversity) than younger islands. When we included alien species in our analyses, we found that the signal of macroevolutionary processes via island age was diluted. Our approach allows a more explicit test of the question of how macroevolutionary factors shape not just regional-scale biodiversity, but also local-scale community assembly patterns and processes in a model archipelago ecosystem, and it can be applied to disentangle biodiversity drivers in other systems.