Data from: Land-use change interacts with island biogeography to alter bird community assembly

Anthropogenic activities have reshaped biodiversity on islands worldwide.
However, it remains unclear how island attributes and land-use change
interactively shape multiple facets of island biodiversity through
community assembly processes. To answer this, we conducted bird surveys in
various land-use types (mainly forest and farmland) using transects on 34
oceanic land-bridge islands in the largest archipelago of China. We found
that bird species richness increases with island area and decreases with
isolation, regardless of the intensity of land-use change. However,
forest-dominated habitats exhibited lower richness than farmland-dominated
habitats. Island bird assemblages generally comprised species that share
more similar traits or evolutionary histories (i.e., functional and/or
phylogenetic clustering) than expected if assemblages were randomly
assembled. Contrary to our expectations, we observed that bird assemblages
in forest-dominated habitats were more clustered on large and close
islands, whereas assemblages in farmland-dominated habitats were more
clustered on small islands. These contrasting results indicate that
land-use change interacts with island biogeography to alter the community
assembly of birds on inhabited islands. Our findings emphasize the
importance of incorporating human-modified habitats when examining the
community assembly of island biota, and further suggest that agricultural
landscapes on large islands may play essential roles in protecting
countryside island biodiversity.