Bell Graham, Lechowicz Martin J, Waterway Marcia J
Redpath Museum, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Ecology. 2006 Jun;87(6):1378-86. doi: 10.1890/0012-9658(2006)87[1378:tcertf]2.0.co;2.
Neutral and functional theories provide rival interpretations of community patterns involving distribution, abundance, and diversity. One group of patterns describes the overall properties of species or sites, and derives principally from the frequency distribution of abundance among species. According to neutral theory, these patterns are determined by the number of individuals of novel type appearing each generation in the community, whereas functional theory relates them to the distribution of the extent of niches. A second group of patterns describes the spatial attributes of communities, and derives principally from the decay of similarity in species composition with distance. Neutral theory interprets these patterns as consequences of local dispersal alone, whereas the functional interpretation is that more distant sites are likely to be ecologically different. Neutral theory often provides good predictions of community patterns, yet is at variance with a wide range of experimental results involving the manipulation of environments or communities. One explanation for this discrepancy is that spatially explicit models where selection is generally weak, or where selection acts strongly on only a few species at each site, have essentially the same output as neutral models with respect to the distribution of abundance and the decay of similarity. Detecting a non-neutral signal in survey data requires careful spatial or phylogenetic analysis; we emphasize the potential utility of incorporating phylogenetic information in order to detect functional processes that lead to ecological variation among clades.
中性理论和功能理论对涉及分布、丰度和多样性的群落格局提供了相互对立的解释。一类格局描述了物种或群落地点的整体属性，主要源自物种间丰度的频率分布。根据中性理论，这些格局由群落中每一代出现的新类型个体数量决定，而功能理论则将它们与生态位宽度的分布联系起来。另一类格局描述了群落的空间属性，主要源自物种组成相似度随距离的衰减。中性理论将这些格局解释为仅由局域扩散导致的结果，而功能理论的解释是距离更远的群落地点在生态上可能存在差异。中性理论常常能对群落格局做出良好预测，但却与一系列涉及环境或群落操纵的实验结果相悖。对此差异的一种解释是，在空间明确的模型中，若选择作用通常较弱，或者若选择仅对每个群落地点的少数物种有强烈作用，那么就丰度分布和相似度衰减而言，其输出结果与中性模型基本相同。要在调查数据中检测到非中性信号，需要进行细致的空间或系统发育分析；我们强调纳入系统发育信息以检测导致不同进化枝间生态差异的功能过程的潜在效用。
