Islands have fascinated ecologists for a long time as they represent natural laboratories to study the interaction between local processeslikecompetitionor predation and regional processes, e.g.immigration, dispersalandextinction. 50 years after MacArthur and Wilson published their seminal “Theory of Island Biogeography”, DynaCom aims to add a new chapter to our understanding of how biodiversity on islands is assembled and maintained by not only predicting how many species are there, but also whichand whatthey are doing.We will be investigating how biodiversity on islands is created and shaped by geography, colonization and localenvironmental conditions. We will especially focus on how the characteristics of marine and terrestrial organismsliving in an area influence ecosystem processes from local to regional scales. In 2014, twelve experimental island were built within the back-barrier tidal flat of Spiekeroog as well as experimental saltmarsh enclosed plots. This infrastructure helps for reaching the goals of the research group DynaCom.