Messages from Islands

Messages from Islands is a synthetic tour of the world of biodiversity --species and their communities--and the habitats in which they live. It looks at how biodiversity is generated in the course of evolution and how is it maintained over time. The itinerary of the tour is question based. What is causing the current 'biodiversity crisis’? What is extinction threshold and what is extinction debt? What is the biodiversity hypothesis about rapidly increasing allergies, asthma, and other chronic inflammatory disorders? What is the third-of-third rule, and could it be the solution to habitat conservation? Each chapter begins on an island, with reflections of his own studies and observations about biodiversity on islands, from a small islet in the Baltic Sea to the large tropical islands of Borneo and Madagascar to Greenland, the world’s largest island. And then steeped in those locations he leads readers on tours of different themes in biodiversity research. Greenland, for example, is a starting point for the world of microbes, and how scientists are coming to understand their staggering biodiversity and how it impacts ecosystems, including the one that lives within our own guts. The result is a conceptually oriented narrative of research on biodiversity, infused with personal anecdotes to convey the excitement of doing aforementioned research. The book is an important introduction to current themes in ecological research to students, and is a highly engaging read for specialists, many of whom in ecology have been influenced by Mr. Hanski’s work.