Of islands on islands: Natural habitat fragmentation drives microallopatric differentiation in the context of distinct biological assemblages

An important evolutionary hypothesis posits that much of the biodiversity we see today was generated by the interplay of colonization, extinction, adaptation, and speciation during episodes of natural habitat fragmentation. To interrogate the generality of this hypothesis, we leverage the natural experiment provided by arthropod communities in kÄ«puka—patches of Hawaiian wet forest isolated by lava flows. With DNA metabarcoding, we provide the first simultaneous exploration of ecological and evolutionary characteristics in the kÄ«puka system. At both species- and haplotype-equivalent scales, we find that diversity scales with kÄ«puka area, and that kÄ«puka accelerate the distance decay of similarity relative to continuous forest. Open lava, kÄ«puka edges, and the centers of the smallest kÄ«puka host lower inter- and intra-specific richness, are more biologically homogeneous, and have higher proportions of non-native OTUs than kÄ«puka centers for the order we could test (Araneae). Our work show..., See \"Materials and methods\" of the manuscript. , , # Of islands on islands: Natural habitat fragmentation drives microallopatric differentiation in the context of distinct biological assemblages

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mgqnk996x](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mgqnk996x)

## Key for abbreviations used below

zOTU- zero-radius operational taxonomic unit

OTU- operational taxonomic unit

NMDS- non-metric multidimensional scaling

MDS- multidimensional scaling

## Description of the data and file structure

Data was collected for a study of how natural fragmentation impacts OTU richness and turnover at the zOTU and 3 % radius OTU scales. 

### Files and variables

#### File: geo\_dist.csv

**Description:** 

A geographic distance matrix between pairs of sampling sites. Site names occur along column names and row names. Distances are in meters. 

#### File: Merged\_by\_site\_2.csv

**Description:** operational taxonomic unit (OTU) counts per site

##### Variables

* *The  blank cells at the top left of the sheet are there on purpos...,