Coral reef diversity refutes the neutral theory of biodiversity
Coral reef diversity refutes the neutral theory of biodiversity
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DOI：
10.1038/nature04534
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发表时间：
2006-03-02
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Hughes, TP
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Dornelas, M;Connolly, SR;Hughes, TP
全球珊瑚礁的衰退(1,2)凸显了了解调节群落结构和维持这些系统生物多样性的机制的必要性。中性理论假设无论物种如何，个体在人口统计上都是相同的，旨在解释群落结构和生物多样性模式的普遍特征(3-5)。在这里，我们使用印度-太平洋珊瑚群落的广泛物种级数据集对中性理论预测进行了测试。我们表明，珊瑚组合与群落相似性模式和物种相对丰度的中性模型预测显着不同。在当地社区内，中性模型不适合相对丰度分布以及经典的对数正态分布。当地群落物种的相对丰度也与中性理论的预测存在显着差异：珊瑚群落表现出的群落相似性值比中性理论所能产生的变化更大，平均水平更低。经验社区相似性偏离中性模型的方向与之前对中性理论的批评所预测的方向相反(6-9)。相反，我们的结果支持时空环境随机性是珊瑚礁多样性模式的主要驱动因素(10,11)。
The global decline of coral reefs(1,2) highlights the need to understand the mechanisms that regulate community structure and sustain biodiversity in these systems. The neutral theory, which assumes that individuals are demographically identical regardless of species, seeks to explain ubiquitous features of community structure and biodiversity patterns(3-5). Here we present a test of neutral-theory predictions with the use of an extensive species-level data set of Indo-Pacific coral communities. We show that coral assemblages differ markedly from neutral-model predictions for patterns of community similarity and the relative abundance of species. Within local communities, neutral models do not fit relative abundance distributions as well as the classical log-normal distribution. Relative abundances of species across local communities also differ markedly from neutral-theory predictions: coral communities exhibit community similarity values that are far more variable, and lower on average, than the neutral theory can produce. Empirical community similarities deviate from the neutral model in a direction opposite to that predicted in previous critiques of the neutral theory(6-9). Instead, our results support spatio-temporal environmental stochasticity as a major driver of diversity patterns on coral reefs(10,11).