Beyond the traditional perception of islands as evolutionary sinks of biodiversityHow does the Macaronesian bryophyte flora contribute to this emerging paradigm in island biogeography?

Abstract

Historical biogeographical trajectories are unevenly known across insu- lar regions and taxonomic groups. While in the case ofvascular plants, the biogeo- graphical origins of a limited number of insular floras are relatively well known, there is still a long way to reach a similar knowledge for insular bryophyte floras. Most of this knowledge is highly concentrated in a few archipelagos distributed across the Northeastern Atlantic Ocean, a region known as Macaronesia. The Ma- caronesian bryophyte flora has been thus the focus of a number of publications as- sessing the historical connectívíty between the insular and the continental settings. Based on this baseline, we revisit the traditional view that reverse colonization from islands to continental regions i nearly impossible from a review ofmounting evidence that out-of-Macaronesia dispersals to Europe and Northern Africa has taken place. Conservation implication and future research lines are discussed.