Predicting community structure in snakes on Eastern Nearctic islands using ecological neutral theory and phylogenetic methods

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Opposing effects of competitive exclusion on the phylogenetic structure of communities.

Margaret M Mayfield, Jonathan M Levine (2010)

Though many processes are involved in determining which species coexist and assemble into communities, competition is among the best studied. One hypothesis about competition's contribution to community assembly is that more closely related species are less likely to coexist. Though empirical evidence for this hypothesis is mixed, it remains a common assumption in certain phylogenetic approaches for inferring the effects of environmental filtering and competitive exclusion. Here, we relate modern coexistence theory to phylogenetic community assembly approaches to refine expectations for how species relatedness influences the outcome of competition. We argue that two types of species differences determine competitive exclusion with opposing effects on relatedness patterns. Importantly, this means that competition can sometimes eliminate more different and less related taxa, even when the traits underlying the relevant species differences are phylogenetically conserved. Our argument leads to a reinterpretation of the assembly processes inferred from community phylogenetic structure.

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The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography at age ten.

James Rosindell, Stephen Hubbell, Rampal S Etienne (2011)

A decade has now passed since Hubbell published The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography. Neutral theory highlights the importance of dispersal limitation, speciation and ecological drift in the natural world and provides quantitative null models for assessing the role of adaptation and natural selection. Significant advances have been made in providing methods for understanding neutral predictions and comparing them with empirical data. In this review, we describe the current state-of-the-art techniques and ideas in neutral theory and how these are of relevance to ecology. The future of neutral theory is promising, but its concepts must be applied more broadly beyond the current focus on species-abundance distributions. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.