The spatial limitations of current neutral models of biodiversity.

ABSTRACT: The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography is increasingly accepted as an informative null model of community composition and dynamics. It has successfully produced macro-ecological patterns such as species-area relationships and species abundance distributions. However, the models employed make many unrealistic auxiliary assumptions. For example, the popular spatially implicit version assumes a local plot exchanging migrants with a large panmictic regional source pool. This simple structure allows rigorous testing of its fit to data. In contrast, spatially explicit models assume that offspring disperse only limited distances from their parents, but one cannot as yet test the significance of their fit to data. Here we compare the spatially explicit and the spatially implic

SUBMITTER: Etienne RS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3056651 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature