Commonness and rarity in the marine biosphere.

ABSTRACT: Explaining patterns of commonness and rarity is fundamental for understanding and managing biodiversity. Consequently, a key test of biodiversity theory has been how well ecological models reproduce empirical distributions of species abundances. However, ecological models with very different assumptions can predict similar species abundance distributions, whereas models with similar assumptions may generate very different predictions. This complicates inferring processes driving community structure from model fits to data. Here, we use an approximation that captures common features of "neutral" biodiversity models--which assume ecological equivalence of species--to test whether neutrality is consistent with patterns of commonness and rarity in the marine biosphere. We do this by analyzing

SUBMITTER: Connolly SR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4060690 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature