title: A unified model explains commonness and rarity on coral reefs.
abstract: Abundance patterns in ecological communities have important implications for biodiversity maintenance and ecosystem functioning. However, ecological theory has been largely unsuccessful at capturing multiple macroecological abundance patterns simultaneously. Here, we propose a parsimonious model that unifies widespread ecological relationships involving local aggregation, species-abundance distributions, and species associations, and we test this model against the metacommunity structure of reef-building corals and coral reef fishes across the western and central Pacific. For both corals and fishes, the unified model simultaneously captures extremely well local species-abundance distributions, interspecific variation in the strength of spatial aggregation, patterns of community similarity, species accumulation, and regional species richness, performing far better than alternative models also examined here and in previous work on coral reefs. Our approach contributes to the development of synthetic theory for large-scale patterns of community structure in nature, and to addressing ongoing challenges in biodiversity conservation at macroecological scales.
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld., Australia.|Marine Biology and Aquaculture, College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld., Australia.
authors.forename: Sean R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Connolly
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld., Australia.
authors.forename: Terry P
authors.initials: TP
authors.lastname: Hughes
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld., Australia.|Marine Biology and Aquaculture, College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Townsville, Qld., Australia.
authors.forename: David R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Bellwood
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D037421:Anthozoa / Q000502:physiology*; D044822:Biodiversity; D057894:Coral Reefs; D005399:Fishes / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D010140:Pacific Ocean; D011156:Population Density
keywords: Aggregation; Taylor's power law; biodiversity; coral reefs; macroecology; species-abundance distribution; unified theories