Institut für Festkörperphysik, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2021 Feb 25;11(1):4632. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-84077-0.
Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these models revolve around speciation, dispersal, and extinction, but they usually neglect trophic structure. Here, we propose and study a spatially extended evolutionary food web model that allows us to study large spatial systems with several trophic layers. Our computer simulations show that the model gives rise simultaneously to several biodiversity patterns in space and time, from species abundance distributions to the waxing and waning of geographic ranges. We find that trophic position in the network plays a crucial role when it comes to the time evolution of range sizes, because the trophic context restricts the occurrence and survival of species especially on higher trophic levels.
生态系统在时空上表现出多种特征的生物多样性模式。理论上的一个挑战是找到能够再现和解释观察到的模式的模型。自从岛屿生物地理学出现以来，这些模型就围绕着物种形成、扩散和灭绝展开，但它们通常忽略了营养结构。在这里，我们提出并研究了一个空间扩展的进化食物网模型，该模型使我们能够研究具有多个营养层的大空间系统。我们的计算机模拟表明，该模型同时在时空上产生了几种生物多样性模式，从物种丰富度分布到地理范围的兴衰。我们发现，在网络中的营养位置在范围大小的时间演化中起着至关重要的作用，因为营养背景尤其限制了较高营养水平上物种的出现和生存。
