Solution of the spatial neutral model yields new bounds on the Amazonian species richness.

ABSTRACT: Neutral models, in which individual agents with equal fitness undergo a birth-death-mutation process, are very popular in population genetics and community ecology. Usually these models are applied to populations and communities with spatial structure, but the analytic results presented so far are limited to well-mixed or mainland-island scenarios. Here we combine analytic results and numerics to obtain an approximate solution for the species abundance distribution and the species richness for the neutral model on continuous landscape. We show how the regional diversity increases when the recruitment length decreases and the spatial segregation of species grows. Our results are supported by extensive numerical simulations and allow one to probe the numerically inaccessible regime of large-

SUBMITTER: Shem-Tov Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5314346 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature