Chapter 7: Revisiting Species and Subspecies of Island Birds for a Better Assessment of Biodiversity

Abstract Outdated and overly lumped alpha taxonomy among the world's island birds has serious consequences for scientific research and conservation. The underestimation of biodiversity on islands obscures their role as speciation laboratories, distorts sampling in genetic studies, biases research planning, leads to neglect of endangered island species mistakenly classified as subspecies, and reduces potentially valuable information that might be gathered by recreational birders. Suggestions such as abandoning the biological species concept and the subspecies category in favor of the phylogenetic species concept create new problems and disrupt widely understood terminology. I review avian taxonomic history in the Hawaiian Islands, speciation patterns in Pacific island pigeons and doves, and patterns of variation in the widespread Polynesian Starling (Aplonis tabuensis) to demonstrate that the biological species concept, if applied with consideration of potential isolating mechanisms, vagility, and degree o...