State Key Laboratory of Grassland Agro-ecosystems, School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China.
J Theor Biol. 2013 Jan 21;317:212-8. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2012.10.019. Epub 2012 Oct 23.
Niche theory and neutral theory are two major developments aiming at explaining patterns of biodiversity observed in nature. Both theories have been found relevant either separately or simultaneously in some real communities, and it has been theoretically demonstrated that they can produce similar species abundance distributions. However, it remains controversial whether the two theories can produce similar patterns via different mechanisms, or can interact to jointly produce the observed diversity patterns, or whether the patterns generated by the neutral model are robust to niche structure. Here we show that, although the neutral model proposed for spatially discrete communities remains robust to strong niche structure for high-diversity communities, the inclusion of more realistic niche differentiation modes greatly improves the goodness of fit to Indo-Pacific coral reefs. Actually, the multiple discrete communities' neutral model, due to its underestimation of the number or abundance of common species, fails to capture the combination of many rare species and a few highly abundant species that characterize the Indo-Pacific coral reef communities. By incorporating niche structure into the multiple discrete communities' model, the hybrid niche-neutral models can successfully reproduce both the species-based and individual-based abundance distribution patterns observed in the coral reefs. We proposed that both niche theory and neutral theory may be involved in explaining the structure of such communities. Our results also suggest a negative relationship between per capita birth to death ratio and immigration among different guilds of coral species, which clearly deserves further investigation.
生态位理论和中性理论是旨在解释自然界中观察到的生物多样性模式的两个主要发展。这两个理论在一些真实的群落中，要么单独，要么同时被发现是相关的，并且理论上已经证明它们可以产生相似的物种丰富度分布。然而，关于这两个理论是否可以通过不同的机制产生相似的模式，是否可以相互作用共同产生观察到的多样性模式，或者中性模型产生的模式是否对生态位结构具有稳健性，仍然存在争议。在这里，我们表明，尽管针对空间离散群落提出的中性模型对于高多样性群落的强生态位结构仍然具有稳健性，但包含更现实的生态位分化模式可以大大提高对印度-太平洋珊瑚礁的拟合优度。实际上，由于对常见物种的数量或丰度的低估，多离散群落的中性模型无法捕捉到印度-太平洋珊瑚礁群落的特征，即许多稀有物种和少数高度丰富物种的组合。通过将生态位结构纳入多离散群落模型，混合生态位-中性模型可以成功地再现珊瑚礁中观察到的基于物种和基于个体的丰度分布模式。我们提出，生态位理论和中性理论都可能参与解释这些群落的结构。我们的结果还表明，不同珊瑚物种群体之间的人均出生-死亡比和移民之间存在负相关关系，这显然值得进一步研究。
