title: A neutral theory with environmental stochasticity explains static and dynamic properties of ecological communities.
abstract: Understanding the forces shaping ecological communities is crucial to basic science and conservation. Neutral theory has made considerable progress in explaining static properties of communities, like species abundance distributions (SADs), with a simple and generic model, but was criticised for making unrealistic predictions of fundamental dynamic patterns and for being sensitive to interspecific differences in fitness. Here, we show that a generalised neutral theory incorporating environmental stochasticity may resolve these limitations. We apply the theory to real data (the tropical forest of Barro Colorado Island) and demonstrate that it much better explains the properties of short-term population fluctuations and the decay of compositional similarity with time, while retaining the ability to explain SADs. Furthermore, the predictions are considerably more robust to interspecific fitness differences. Our results suggest that this integration of niches and stochasticity may serve as a minimalistic framework explaining fundamental static and dynamic characteristics of ecological communities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, Institute of Life Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Givat-Ram, Jerusalem, 91904, Israel.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kalyuzhny
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, Institute of Life Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Givat-Ram, Jerusalem, 91904, Israel.
authors.forename: Ronen
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kadmon
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel.
authors.forename: Nadav M
authors.initials: NM
authors.lastname: Shnerb
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D058448:Biota; D004463:Ecology / Q000379:methods; D065928:Forests; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011156:Population Density; D011157:Population Dynamics; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D013997:Time Factors
keywords: BCI; community dynamics; community similarity; demographic stochasticity; environmental stochasticity; fluctuation scaling; neutral theory; population fluctuations; species abundance distributions