The stuy of island biogeography is a field within biogeography that attempts to establish and explain the factors that affect the species richness of a particular community. In this context the island can be any area of habitat surrounded by areas unsuitable for the species on the island; not just true islands surrounded by ocean, but also mountains surrounded by deserts, lakes surrounded by dry land, forest fragments surrounded by human-altered landscapes. The field was started in the 1960s by the ecologists Robert MacArthur and E.O. Wilson, who coined the term theory of island biogeography, as this theory attempted to predict the number of species that would exist on a newly created island.