Cross-scale neutral ecology and the maintenance of biodiversity.

ABSTRACT: One of the first successes of neutral ecology was to predict realistically-broad distributions of rare and abundant species. However, it has remained an outstanding theoretical challenge to describe how this distribution of abundances changes with spatial scale, and this gap has hampered attempts to use observed species abundances as a way to quantify what non-neutral processes are needed to fully explain observed patterns. To address this, we introduce a new formulation of spatial neutral biodiversity theory and derive analytical predictions for the way abundance distributions change with scale. For tropical forest data where neutrality has been extensively tested before now, we apply this approach and identify an incompatibility between neutral fits at regional and local scales. We use t

SUBMITTER: O'Dwyer JP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6033888 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature