ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Understanding how biodiversity unfolds through time under neutral theory.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Towards an integrative understanding of soil biodiversity.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2020Pooled it
- A comprehensive comparison of tools for fitting mutational signatures.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Neutral processes underlying the macro eco-evolutionary dynamics of mixed-ploidy systems.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Environmental and topographic drivers of amphibian phylogenetic diversity and endemism in the Iberian Peninsula.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Predicting the Impact of Describing New Species on Phylogenetic Patterns.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2019Article
- Simulating Groundcover Community Assembly in a Frequently Burned Ecosystem Using a Simple Neutral Model.Frontiers in plant science · 2019Article
- Article
- The challenges to inferring the regulators of biodiversity in deep time.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Quantifying the effects of the break up of Pangaea on global terrestrial diversification with neutral theory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Theoretical predictions for biodiversity patterns are typically derived under the assumption that ecological systems have reached a dynamic equilibrium. Yet, there is increasing evidence that various aspects of ecological systems, including (but not limited to) species richness, are not at equilibrium. Here, we use simulations to analyse how biodiversity patterns unfold through time. In particular, we focus on the relative time required for various biodiversity patterns (macroecological or phylogenetic) to reach equilibrium. We simulate spatially explicit metacommunities according to the Neutral Theory of Biodiversity (NTB) under three modes of speciation, which differ in how evenly a parent species is split between its two daughter species. We find that species richness stabilizes first, followed by species area relationships (SAR) and finally species abundance distributions (SAD). The difference in timing of equilibrium between these different macroecological patterns is the largest when the split of individuals between sibling species at speciation is the most uneven. Phylogenetic patterns of biodiversity take even longer to stabilize (tens to hundreds of times longer than species richness) so that equilibrium predictions from neutral theory for these patterns are unlikely to be relevant. Our results suggest that it may be unwise to assume that biodiversity patterns are at equilibrium and provide a first step in studying how these patterns unfold through time.
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