Commonness and rarity in the marine biosphere
Commonness and rarity in the marine biosphere
复制标题
DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1406664111
复制
发表时间：
2014-06-10
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Wilson, Robin S.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Connolly, Sean R.;MacNeil, M. Aaron;Wilson, Robin S.
解释普遍性和稀有性的模式是理解和管理生物多样性的基础。因此，生物多样性理论的一个关键测试是生态模型如何很好地再现物种丰度的经验分布。然而，具有非常不同假设的生态模型可以预测相似的物种丰度分布，而具有相似假设的模型可能会产生非常不同的预测。这使得从模型拟合到数据驱动社区结构的推断过程变得复杂。在这里，我们使用了一个近似的方法，捕捉了“中性”生物多样性模型的共同特征——假设物种的生态等效——来测试中性是否与海洋生物圈的普遍性和稀有性模式相一致。我们通过分析从潮间带栖息地到深海，从热带到极地的14个海洋生态系统中的1185个物种丰度分布来做到这一点。中立性比经典的非中立性表现得更差：经验数据一致显示物种丰度的异质性比中立性下的预期更大。中性理论之所以表现不佳，是因为它始终无法捕捉到群落中最丰富物种的优势地位。先前的测试表明，中性模型对特定系统的表现不佳，随后往往会引发争议，即中性理论的另一种表述是否能够解释这些数据。然而，我们的方法侧重于中性模型的共同特征，揭示了与广泛的经验丰度分布的差异。这些发现强调了生物多样性理论的必要性，其中物种之间的生态差异，如生态位差异和人口权衡，发挥了核心作用。
Explaining patterns of commonness and rarity is fundamental for understanding and managing biodiversity. Consequently, a key test of biodiversity theory has been how well ecological models reproduce empirical distributions of species abundances. However, ecological models with very different assumptions can predict similar species abundance distributions, whereas models with similar assumptions may generate very different predictions. This complicates inferring processes driving community structure from model fits to data. Here, we use an approximation that captures common features of "neutral" biodiversity models-which assume ecological equivalence of species-to test whether neutrality is consistent with patterns of commonness and rarity in the marine biosphere. We do this by analyzing 1,185 species abundance distributions from 14 marine ecosystems ranging from intertidal habitats to abyssal depths, and from the tropics to polar regions. Neutrality performs substantially worse than a classical nonneutral alternative: empirical data consistently show greater heterogeneity of species abundances than expected under neutrality. Poor performance of neutral theory is driven by its consistent inability to capture the dominance of the communities' most-abundant species. Previous tests showing poor performance of a neutral model for a particular system often have been followed by controversy about whether an alternative formulation of neutral theory could explain the data after all. However, our approach focuses on common features of neutral models, revealing discrepancies with a broad range of empirical abundance distributions. These findings highlight the need for biodiversity theory in which ecological differences among species, such as niche differences and demographic trade-offs, play a central role.