Related papers: Age-abundance relationships for neutral communitie…
Neutral dynamics, where taxa are assumed to be demographically equivalent and their abundance is governed solely by the stochasticity of the underlying birth-death process, has proved itself as an important minimal model that accounts for…
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…
The maintenance of diversity, the `commonness of rarity', and compositional turnover are ubiquitous features of species-rich communities. Through a minimal model, we consider how these features reflect the interplay between environmental…
Despite its radical assumption of ecological equivalence between species, neutral biodiversity theory can often provide good fits to species abundance distributions observed in nature. Major criticisms of neutral theory have focused on…
Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of…
Using an artificial system of self-replicating strings, we show a correlation between the age of a genotype and its abundance that reflects a punctuated rather than gradual picture of evolution, as suggested long ago by Willis. In support…
In this paper we study a model of age-structured ecological populations in continuous interaction with a community of harvesters. We propose an individual-based model for this feedback interactions and prove its convergence to a system of…
Models of many-species ecosystems, such as the Lotka-Volterra and replicator equations, suggest that these systems generically exhibit near-extinction processes, where population sizes go very close to zero for some time before rebounding,…
Competition is the main driver of population dynamics, which shapes the genetic composition of populations and the assembly of ecological communities. Neutral models assume that all the individuals are equivalent and that the dynamics is…
We used a metacommunity of 49 discrete communities of aquatic invertebrates to analyze the dynamical relationship between community and metacommunity species distributions as a test of the neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. At…
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…
An analytical approximation is derived for the Zero Sum Multinomial distribution which gives the Species Abundance Distribution in Neutral Community Models. The obtained distribution function describes well computer simulation results on…
The ecological principle of limiting similarity dictates that species similar in resource requirements will compete, with the superior eventually excluding the inferior competitor from the community. The observation that nonetheless…
Random matrix theory successfully connects the structure of interactions of large ecological communities to their ability to respond to perturbations. One of the most debated aspects of this approach is the missing role of population…
Despite the general acknowledgment of the role of niche and fitness differences in community dynamics, species abundance has been coined as a relevant feature not just regarding niche perspectives, but also according to neutral…
Understanding the forces shaping ecological communities is crucially important to basic science and conservation. In recent years, considerable progress was made in explaining communities using simple and general models, with neutral theory…
A probability model is presented for the dynamics of mutation-selection balance in a haploid infinite-population infinite-sites setting sufficiently general to cover mutation-driven changes in full age-specific demographic schedules. The…
Dynamics of species' abundances in ecological communities are often described using models that only account for a few species. It is not clear when and why this would be possible, as most species form part of diverse ecological…
Niche and neutral theory are two prevailing, yet much debated, ideas in ecology proposed to explain the patterns of biodiversity. Whereas niche theory emphasizes selective differences between species and interspecific interactions in…
Standard neutral population genetics theory with a strictly fixed population size has important limitations. An alternative model that allows independently fluctuating population sizes and reproduces the standard neutral evolution is…