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Within the 11.5 month life of the project I have gained important knowledge that fulfills the objectives of UNISLAND for that period. The large phylogenetic database, together with a number of customized scripts that function to retrieve large amounts of phylogenetic data for the Hawaii and the Canary Islands, and the knowledge gained regarding the fauna and flora of these two iconic volcanic archipelagoes have established the background needed to subsequently conduct further studies on island evolution, with a focus on speciation. Such achievements will include the development of approaches for the identification of demographic trajectories and therefore species that are at the edge of extinction due to natural and/or anthropogenic factors. These objectives that were beyond the termination date of the project UNISLAND will now be developed within the Spanish government funded position that the ER has been awarded. All together these results will be part of a minimum of three publications in top scientific journals. The first paper is in an advanced phase of development, and deals with patterns of evolution and diversification across different oceanic archipelagos and taxonomic groups based on more than 100 studies compiled that included published and novel data. The second paper will be based on the ongoing database for modelling the potential distribution of the native ecosystems in the Canary Islands, and Hawaii. A third paper will be a data-type paper that will include the fine-grained climatic layers generated for the Canary Islands that will be used in the former paper. Note that the early termination was due to that award of a 5-year tenure-track position to the ER, a position that is associated with a new project to study so the ecology and evolution of island biotas that will build up on the UNISLAND project.
UNISLAND was terminated after 11.5 months, and as such there was reduced measurable activity with regard to conference attendance (planned for the first year of UNISLAND), outreach activities, publications, or other activities to disseminate results. I attended the 7th International Conference on Environmental Future, entitled ""Humans and Island Environments"", which was held from April 16-20th 2018 at the Hawaiian International Conference Center in Honolulu. Importantly, one paper was published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution related to the first Obj., along with a response letter, and two papers are in an advanced stage of development. The first paper is a meta-analysis of phylogenies of spiders, angiosperms and beetles from the archipelagos of the Canary Islands and Hawaii, but also including a number of other archipelagos such as the Azores and Galapagos. This paper is in a relative advance state of development, with a bulk of the analyses already performed. There is a second and third paper related to the Obj. 2. The first focuses on methodological aspects, fundamentally data including some important advances regarding to the macroclimatic layers that describe environmental variation across the archipelago of the Canary Islands, and the second on the predictions of community distributions in the past and future under scenarios of climate change. Due to the early termination, we have accordingly modified the plan for exploitation of the results."
