Neutral theory and relative species abundance in ecology

By I. Volkov, Jayanth R. Banavar, Stephen P. Hubbell, Amos Maritan. Nature, 2003

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The theory of island biogeography asserts that an island or a local community approaches an equilibrium species richness as a result of the interplay between the immigration of species from the much larger metacommunity source area and local extinction of species on the island (local community). Hubbell generalized this neutral theory to explore the expected steady-state distribution of relative species abundance (RSA) in the local community under restricted immigration. Here we present a theoretical framework for the unified neutral theory of biodiversity and an analytical solution for the distribution of the RSA both in the metacommunity (Fisher's log series) and in the local community, where there are fewer rare species. Rare species are more extinction-prone, and once they go locally extinct, they take longer to re-immigrate than do common species. Contrary to recent assertions, we show that the analytical solution provides a better fit, with fewer free parameters, to the RSA distribution of tree species on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, than the lognormal distribution.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/268634ad998de1c5b0db15cbff105e70dda68df5

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Citations in the corpus

Species co-occurrences and neutral models: reassessing J. M. Diamond's assembly rules (2004, background): “These tests focused mainly on species rank order distributions (McGill 2003, Volkov et al. 2003) and evolutionary lineages (Clark and McLachlan 2003).”
Neutral theory in community ecology and the hypothesis of functional equivalence (2005, background): “Much has been written about the unified neutral theory (UNT) since my book appeared (Hubbell 2001), some of it critical, and there have been several major technical and conceptual advances in the theory since then (e.g. Volkov et al .”
Trade‐offs in community ecology: linking spatial scales and species coexistence (2004, background): “…Enquist et al. 2002; Whitfield 2002; Norris 2003), Hubbell’s neutral model has achieved some success in a variety of systems (Hubbell 1979; Hubbell et al. 1999; Bell 2001; Hubbell 2001; Volkov et al. 2003), but less success in other systems (Condit et al. 2002; McGill 2003; Tuomisto et al. 2003).”
The lognormal distribution is not an appropriate null hypothesis for the species–abundance distribution (2005, neutral): “Williams (1964) used probit plots as well.”
Species abundance distributions: moving beyond single prediction theories to integration within an ecological framework. (2007, methodology): “But every study of which we are aware that meets all (or even two) of these criteria has found that no one SAD is superior (Wilson 1991; Wilson et al. 1996; McGill 2003a; Volkov et al. 2003; Etienne & Olff 2005).”
Neutral theory and community ecology (2004, methodology): “This adds a further complication to the derivation of the species abundance distribution in this model, and it is only recently that Volkov et al. (2003) provided an ingenious solution of this puzzle.”
Quantifying the roles of immigration and chance in shaping prokaryote community structure. (2006, background): “The advantage of the diffusion approximation is that it gives a relatively neat and straightforward analytical solutions in comparison with other published solutions (Houchmandzadeh and Vallade, 2003; Vallade and Houchmandzadeh, 2003; Volkov et al ., 2003; McKane et al., 2004).”