Comment on ‘Island biogeography: patterns of marine shallow-water organisms’ by Hachich et al., Journal of Biogeography (2015)

Abstract

In a recent article, Hachich et al. (2015, Journal of Biogeography, 42, 1871–1882) studied the large-scale biogeographical patterns of the species–area, species–island age and species–isolation relationships associated with marine shallow-water groups (reef fish, gastropods and seaweeds) from 11 Atlantic archipelagos. We here express our concerns regarding the data accuracy used to compute the different models that tested the null hypothesis of species richness being independent of the selected variables. In our commentary, we focus mainly on the use of out-of-date checklists of gastropod and seaweed species from different archipelagos, but we also point out inaccuracies in some island age estimates and explain our disagreement with the use of the 200 m depth limit for the shallow-water gastropods and seaweeds.