Abstract
The central themes of community ecology—distribution, abundance, and diversity—display strongly marked and very general patterns. These include the log-normal distribution of abundance, the relation between range and abundance, the species-area law, and the turnover of species composition. Each pattern is the subject of a large literature that interprets it in terms of ecological processes, typically involving the sorting of differently specialized species onto heterogeneous landscapes. All of these patterns can be shown to arise, however, from neutral community models in which all individuals have identical properties, as the consequence of local dispersal alone. This implies, at the least, that functional interpretations of these patterns must be reevaluated. More fundamentally, neutral community models provide a general theory for biodiversity and conservation biology capable of predicting the fundamental processes and patterns of community ecology.
Keywords
MacroecologyRelative abundance distributionEcologyBiological dispersalAbundance (ecology)CommunityNeutral theory of molecular evolutionRelative species abundanceRange (aeronautics)BiodiversityBiologyMetacommunitySpecies diversityEcosystemPopulationSociology
Affiliated Institutions
Related Publications
Statistical approaches to interpreting diversity patterns in the Norwegian mountain flora
The richness of Norwegian mountain plants in 75 grid squares is mapped from published distributional data for 109 species. Eleven explanatory variables representing bedrock geol...
THE GEOGRAPHIC RANGE: Size, Shape, Boundaries, and Internal Structure
▪ Abstract Comparative, quantitative biogeographic studies are revealing empirical patterns of interspecific variation in the sizes, shapes, boundaries, and internal structures ...
Historical climate modelling predicts patterns of current biodiversity in the Brazilian Atlantic forest
Abstract Aim We aim to propose validated, spatially explicit hypotheses for the late Quaternary distribution of the Brazilian Atlantic forest, and thereby provide a framework fo...
The Theory of Limiting Similarity
Species distribution models (SDMs) are numerical tools that combine observations of species occurrence or abundance with environmental estimates. They are used to gain ecologica...
Plant diversity and ecosystem productivity: Theoretical considerations
Ecosystem processes are thought to depend on both the number and identity of the species present in an ecosystem, but mathematical theory predicting this has been lacking. Here ...
Publication Info
- Year
- 2001
- Type
- review
- Volume
- 293
- Issue
- 5539
- Pages
- 2413-2418
- Citations
- 687
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
687
OpenAlex
Cite This
Graham Bell
(2001).
Neutral Macroecology.
Science
, 293
(5539)
, 2413-2418.
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.293.5539.2413
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1126/science.293.5539.2413