By Stephen P. Hubbell
Despite its splendid significance and the specter of its worldwide crash, biodiversity is still poorly understood either empirically and theoretically. This formidable e-book offers a brand new, common impartial conception to give an explanation for the starting place, upkeep, and lack of biodiversity in a biogeographic context.
formerly biogeography (the research of the geographic distribution of species) and biodiversity (the learn of species richness and relative species abundance) have had mostly disjunct highbrow histories. during this ebook, Stephen Hubbell develops a proper mathematical concept that unifies those fields. while a speciation approach is included into Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson's now classical conception of island biogeography, the generalized concept predicts the lifestyles of a common, dimensionless biodiversity quantity. within the concept, this basic biodiversity quantity, including the migration or dispersal fee, thoroughly determines the steady-state distribution of species richness and relative species abundance on neighborhood to giant geographic spatial scales and temporary to evolutionary time scales.
even though impartial, Hubbell's conception is however in a position to generate many nonobvious, testable, and remarkably actual quantitative predictions approximately biodiversity and biogeography. in lots of methods Hubbell's thought is the ecological analog to the impartial thought of genetic float in genetics. The unified impartial conception of biogeography and biodiversity should still stimulate study in new theoretical and empirical instructions by way of ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and biogeographers.
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Extra info for The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography (MPB-32) (Monographs in Population Biology)
Sample text
In the equilibrium analysis of mul43 CHAPTER TWO tispecies Lotka-Volterra competition, the focus has been almost exclusively on community stability and species coexistence, not on relative species abundance. No one to my knowledge has ever found any compelling theoretical basis for lognormal relative abundances in this body of theory. Lotka-Volterra theory is sufficiently parameter rich that no doubt someone could cleverly choose carrying capacities and competition coefficients that would yield a canonical lognormal distribution at equilibrium.
The idea that random dispersal 15 CHAPTER ONE and ecological drift could be important in structuring communities was by no means new. Dispersal-assembly theories date back at least to the seminal book, Age and Area, A Study of Geographic Distribution and Origin in Species, by a Cambridge University professor J. C. Willis (1922). Similar ideas were independently developed by Gleason (1922, 1926, 1939). However, the success of MacArthur and Wilson’s theory brought these old ideas renewed credibility and attention.
Taking the first steps to reconcile these divergent views of ecological nature is the underlying theme of this book. 29 CHAPTER TWO On Current Theories of Relative Species Abundance No other general attribute of ecological communities besides species richness has commanded more theoretical and empirical attention than relative species abundance. Commonness, and especially rarity, have long fascinated ecologists (Rabinowitz et al. 1986, Hubbell and Foster 1986a, Gaston 1994), and species abundance is of central theoretical and practical importance in conservation biology (Soul´e 1986).