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17 - Scaling biodiversity under neutrality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

By
Luís Borda-de-Água ,
Stephen P. Hubbell  and
Fangliang He
Edited by
David Storch ,
Pablo Marquet  and
James Brown
Luís Borda-de-Água
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
Stephen P. Hubbell
Affiliation:
University of Georgia, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Fangliang He
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
David Storch
Affiliation:
Charles University, Prague
Pablo Marquet
Affiliation:
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
James Brown
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
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Summary

Introduction

To better understand biodiversity scaling, it may be useful to characterize the biodiversity scaling relationships that arise from the neutral perspective. This exercise will help in formulating quantitative null hypotheses for observed biodiversity scaling relationships. Here we use the term biodiversity to refer not only to species richness, but also to relative species abundance, and biodiversity scaling to refer to how patterns of biodiversity change on increasing sampling (spatial) scales. The study of biodiversity includes questions about the spatial dispersion and geographic range of species, relative species abundance, endemism, and beta diversity, the turnover of species across landscapes. A full discussion of all-taxa biodiversity scaling in the context of neutral theory is beyond the scope of the present theory because the theory currently applies only to communities of trophically similar species (a tree community, for example). It is also individual based rather than biomass based. Despite these limitations neutral theory is nevertheless a mechanistic, dynamical theory of community assembly based on fundamental demographic processes (birth, death, dispersal, speciation) – even though its postulated assembly rules are extremely simple. Under current neutral theory, speciation, ecological drift (demographic stochasticity in birth and deaths), and dispersal govern the presence or absence and the abundance of species in communities over local to global scales. Extinction is also critically important, but under neutrality, the extinction rate can be predicted once the other three processes are known.

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Chapter
Information
Scaling Biodiversity , pp. 347 - 375
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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