Abstract:
The central goal of ecology is to understand the ecological assembly rules
of natural communities on local to global scales. Remarkable progress
towards this goal has been achieved over the last several decades through
primarily reductionistic approaches on small observational and experimental
scales. However, significant unanswered theoretical and empirical questions
still abound, particularly on large spatial and temporal scales. Classical
theory asserts that ecological nature is fundamentally asymmetric by
emphasizing the inherent uniqueness of all species in ecological communities
(i.e., niche assembly theory). According to this largely deterministic
perspective, competing species coexist in closed, stable assemblages by
partitioning limiting resources through niche differentiation. However,
symmetric neutral theory, in which all species broadly overlap in the use of
resources and obey the same ecological interaction rules on a per capita
basis, has recently been shown to be qualitatively and quantitatively
consistent with a number of major macroecological pattern regularities, many
of which have remained unexplained or largely so, by contemporary niche
assembly theory. These including patterns of relative species abundance
(RSA), species-area relationships, and even phylogeny. According to this
largely statistical-mechanical perspective, ecological communities consist
of open, nonequilibrium assemblages of species whose presence, absence, and
relative abundance are governed by random speciation, dispersal, ecological
drift, and extinction. One of the major theoretical challenges to
theoretical ecology is to reconcile niche assembly theory and neutral
theory. This talk will outline some of the recent results of neutral theory
and steps towards a theoretical reconciliation of these two very different
perspectives in ecology.
©Andreas Voigt