TY - JOUR
T1 - Emergent neutrality in consumer-resource dynamics
AU - D'Andrea, Rafael
AU - Gibbs, Theo
AU - O'Dwyer, James P.
N1 - Funding Information:
JPO was funded by Simons Foundation Grant #376199 (www.simonsfoundation.org) and McDonnell Foundation Grant #220020439 (www. jsmf.org). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 D'Andrea et al.
PY - 2020/7
Y1 - 2020/7
N2 - Neutral theory assumes all species and individuals in a community are ecologically equivalent. This controversial hypothesis has been tested across many taxonomic groups and environmental contexts, and successfully predicts species abundance distributions across multiple high-diversity communities. However, it has been critiqued for its failure to predict a broader range of community properties, particularly regarding community dynamics from generational to geological timescales. Moreover, it is unclear whether neutrality can ever be a true description of a community given the ubiquity of interspecific differences, which presumably lead to ecological inequivalences. Here we derive analytical predictions for when and why non-neutral communities of consumers and resources may present neutral-like outcomes, which we verify using numerical simulations. Our results, which span both static and dynamical community properties, demonstrate the limitations of summarizing distributions to detect non-neutrality, and provide a potential explanation for the successes of neutral theory as a description of macroecological pattern.
AB - Neutral theory assumes all species and individuals in a community are ecologically equivalent. This controversial hypothesis has been tested across many taxonomic groups and environmental contexts, and successfully predicts species abundance distributions across multiple high-diversity communities. However, it has been critiqued for its failure to predict a broader range of community properties, particularly regarding community dynamics from generational to geological timescales. Moreover, it is unclear whether neutrality can ever be a true description of a community given the ubiquity of interspecific differences, which presumably lead to ecological inequivalences. Here we derive analytical predictions for when and why non-neutral communities of consumers and resources may present neutral-like outcomes, which we verify using numerical simulations. Our results, which span both static and dynamical community properties, demonstrate the limitations of summarizing distributions to detect non-neutrality, and provide a potential explanation for the successes of neutral theory as a description of macroecological pattern.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008102
DO - 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008102
M3 - Article
C2 - 32730245
AN - SCOPUS:85089610614
SN - 1553-734X
VL - 16
JO - PLoS Computational Biology
JF - PLoS Computational Biology
IS - 7
M1 - e1008102
ER -