Abstract
One of the central goals of community ecology is to understand the forces that maintain species diversity within communities. The traditional niche-assembly theory asserts that species live together in a community only when they differ from one another in resource uses. But this theory has some difficulties in explaining the diversity often observed in specie-rich communities such as tropical forests. As an alternative to the niche theory, Hubbell and other ecologists introduced a neutral model. Hubbell argues that the number of species in a community is controlled by species extinction and immigration or speciation of new species. Assuming that all individuals of all species in a trophically similar community are ecologically equivalent, Hubbell’s neutral theory predicts two important statistical distributions. One is the asymptotic log-series distribution for the metacommunities under point mutation speciation, and the other is the zero-sum multinomial distribution for both local communities under dispersal limitation and metacommunities under random fission speciation. Unlike the niche-assembly theory, the neutral theory takes similarity in species and individuals as a starting point for investigating species diversity. Based on the fundamental processes of birth, death, dispersal and speciation, the neutral theory provided the first mechanistic explanation of species abundance distribution commonly observed in natural communities. Since the publication of the neutral theory, there has been much discussion about it, pro and con. In this paper, we summarize recent progress in the assumption, prediction and speciation mode of the neutral theory, including progress in the theory itself, tests about the assumption of the theory, prediction and speciation mode at the metacommunity level. We also suggest that the most important task in the future is to bridge the niche-assembly theory and the neutral theory, and to add species differences to the neutral theory and more stochasticity to the niche theory.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alonso D, McKane A J (2004). Sampling Hubbell’s neutral theory of biodiversity. Ecology Letters, 7: 901–910
Armstrong R A (1989). Competition, seed predation, and species coexistence. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 141: 191–195
Bell G (2000). The distribution of abundance in neutral communities. American Naturalist, 155: 606–617
Bell G (2001). Neutral macroecology. Science, 293: 2413–2418
Chase J (2005). Towards a really unified theory for metacommunities. Function ecology, 19: 182–186
Chave J (2004). Neutral theory and community ecology. Ecology Letters, 7: 241–253
Chave J, Leigh E G (2002). A spatially explicit neutral model of beta-diversity in tropical forests. Theoretical Population Biology, 62: 153–168
Chave J, Muller-Landau H C, Levin S A (2002). Comparing classical community models: Theoretical consequences for patterns of diversity. American Naturalist, 159: 1–23
Chesson P (2000). Mechanisms of maintenance of species diversity. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 31: 343–366
Condit R, Hubbell S P, Foster R B (1995). Mortality rates of 205 neotropical tree and shrub species and the impact of a severe drought. Ecological Monographs, 65: 419–439
Durrett R, Levin S A (1996). Spatial models for species area curves. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 179: 119–127
Etienne R S (2005). A new sampling formula for neutral biodiversity. Ecology Letters, 8: 253–260
Etienne R S, Alonso D (2005). A dispersal-limited sampling theory for species and alleles. Ecology Letters, 8: 1147–1156
Etienne R S, Olff H (2004a). How dispersal limitation shapes speciesbody size distributions in local communities. American Naturalist, 163: 69–83
Etienne R S, Olff H (2004b). A novel genealogical approach to neutral biodiversity theory. Ecology Letters, 7: 170–175
Ewens W J (1972). The sampling theory of selectively neutral alleles. Theoretical Population Biology, 3: 87–112
Fisher R A, Corbet A S, Williams C B (1943). The relation between the number of species and the number of individuals in a random sample from an animal population. Journal of Animal Ecology, 12: 42–58
Harpole W S, Tilman D (2006). Non-neutral patterns of species abundance in grassland communities. Ecology Letters 9: 15–23
Hubbell S P (1979). Tree dispersion, abundance, and diversity in a tropical dry forest. Science, 203: 1299–1309
Hubbell S P (2001). The Unified Neural Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Hubbell S P (2003). Modes of speciation and the lifespans of species under neutrality: A response to the comment of Robert E. Ricklefs. Oikos, 100: 193–199
Hubbell S P (2005a). Neutral theory in community ecology and the hypothesis of functional equivalence. Functional Ecology, 19: 166–172
Hubbell S P (2005b). The neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography and Stephen Jay Gould. Paleobiology, 31: 122–132
Hubbell S P (2006). Neutral theory and the evolution of ecological equivalence. Ecology, 87: 1387–1398
Hubbell S P, Foster R B (1983). Diversity of canopy trees in a neotropical forest and implications for conservation. In: Sutton S L, Whitmore T C, Chadwick A C, eds. Tropical Rain Forest: Ecology and Management. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 25–41
Hubbell S P, Foster R B (1986). Biology, chance and history and the structure of tropical rain forest tree communities. In Diamond J M, Case T J, eds. Community Ecology. New York: Harper and Row, 314–329
Karlin S, McGregor J (1967). The number of mutants maintained in a population. Proc. 5th Berkeley Symp Math Stat Prob, 4: 415–438
Karlin S, McGregor J (1972). Polymorphisms for genetic and ecdogical systems with weak coupling. Theoretical Population Biology, 3: 210–238
Levin S A, Nathan R, Muller-Landau H C, Chave J (2003). The ecology and evolution of dispersal: A theoretical perspective. Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics, 34: 575–604
MacArthur R H (1957). On the relative abundance of bird species. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 43: 293–295
MacArthur R H, Wilson E O (1963). An equilibrium theory of insular zoogeography. Evolution, 17: 373–387
MacArthur R H, Wilson E O (1967). The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Magurran A E, Henderson P A (2003). Explaining the excess of rare species in natural species abundance distributions. Nature, 422: 714–716
McGill B J (2003). A test of the unified neutral theory of biodiversity. Nature, 422: 881–885
Mouquet N, Loreau M (2003). Coexistence in metacommunities: The regional similarity hypothesis. American Naturalist, 162: 544–557
Ostling A (2005). Neutral theory tested by birds. Nature, 436: 635–636
Pandolfi J M (1996). Limited membership in Pleistocene reef coral assemblages from the Huon Peninsula, Papua New Guinea: constancy during global change. Paleobiology, 22: 152–176
Pandolfi J M (2002). Coral community dynamics at multiple scales. Coral Reefs, 21: 13–23
Poulin R (2004). Parasites and the neutral theory of biodiversity. Ecography, 27: 119–123
Preston F W (1948). The commonness and rarity of species. Ecology, 29: 254–283
Purves D W, Pacala S W (2005). Ecological drift in niche-structured communities: neutral pattern does not imply neutral process. In: Burslem D, Pinard, M, Hartley S, eds. Eiotic Interactions in the Tropics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 107–138
Ricklefs R E (2003). A comment on Hubbell’s zero-sum ecological drift model. Oikos, 100: 185–192
Sheil D, Jennings S, Savill P (2000). Long-term permanent plot observations of vegetation dynamics in Budongo, a Ugandan rain forest. Journal of Tropical Ecology, 16: 765–800
Sugihara G, Bersier L, Southwood T R E, Pimm S L, May R M (2003). Predicted correspondence between species abundance and dendrograms of niche similarity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100: 5246–5251
Tilman D, Pacala S (1993). The maintenance of species richness in plant communities. In: Ricklefs R E, Schluter D, eds. Species Diversity in Ecological Communities. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 13–25
Tokeshi M (1990). Niche apportionment or random assortment: Species abundance patterns revisited. Journal of Animal Ecology, 59: 1129–1146
Volkov I, Banavar J R, Hubbell S P, Maritan A (2003). Neutral theory and relative species abundance in ecology. Nature, 424: 1,035–1,037
Volkov I, BanavarJ R, He F, Hubbell S P, Maritan A (2005). Density dependence explains tree species abundance and diversity in tropical forests. Nature, 438: 658–661
Walker S C, Cyr H (2007). Testing the standard neutral model of biodiversity in lake communities. Oikos, 116: 143–155
Wootton J T (2005). Field-parameterization and experimental test of the neutral of biodiversity. Nature, 433: 309–312
Yu D W, Terborgh J W, Potts M D (1998). Can high tree species richness be explained by Hubbell’s null model? Ecology Letters, 1: 193–199
Zhang D Y, Lin K (1997). The effects of competitive asymmetry on the rate of competitive displacement: How robust is Hubbell’s community drift model? Journal of Theoretical Biology, 188: 361–367
Zhang D Y et al. (2000). Researches on Theoretical Ecology. Beijing: China Higher Education Press (in Chinese)
Zhou S R, Zhang D Y (2007). A nearly neutral model of biodiversity. Ecology (in press)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
__________
Translated from Journal of Plant Ecology, 2006, 30(5): 868–877 [译自:植物生态学报]
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhou, S., Zhang, D. Neutral theory in community ecology. Front. Biol. China 3, 1–8 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11515-008-0008-z
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11515-008-0008-z