相关论文: A generalized neutral theory explains static and d…
Mutualistic interactions are widespread in nature, from plant communities and microbiomes to human organizations. Along with competition for resources, cooperative interactions shape biodiversity and contribute to the robustness of complex…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Ecosystems display a complex spatial organization. Ecologists have long tried to characterize them by looking at how different measures of biodiversity change across spatial scales. Ecological neutral theory has provided simple predictions…
We demonstrate how niche theory and Hubbell's original formulation of neutral theory can be blended together into a general framework modeling the combined effects of selection, drift, speciation, and dispersal on community dynamics. This…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
We present novel analytical results about ecosystem species diversity that stem from a proposed coarse grained neutral model based on birth-death processes. The relevance of the problem lies in the urgency for understanding and synthesizing…
Understanding the relationship between complexity and stability in large dynamical systems -- such as ecosystems -- remains a key open question in complexity theory which has inspired a rich body of work developed over more than fifty…
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…
Patterns of biodiversity predicted by the neutral theory rely on a simple phenomenological model of speciation. To further investigate the effect of speciation on neutral biodiversity, we analyze a spatially-explicit neutral model based on…
We develop an theoretical approach for predicting biodiversity in multi-dimensional niche spaces, arising due to ecological drivers such as competitive exclusion. The novelty of our approach relies on the fact that ecological niches are…
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…
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…
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…
Hubbell's neutral theory of biodiversity has successfully explained the observed composition of many ecological communities but it relies on strict demographic equivalence among species and provides no room for evolutionary processes like…
A central issue in ecology today is that of the factors determining the relative abundance of species within a natural community. The proper application of the principles of statistical physics to the problem of species abundance…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
Neutral models for the dynamics of a system of competing species are used, nowadays, to describe a wide variety of empirical communities. These models are used in many situations, ranging from population genetics and ecological biodiversity…