Commonness and rarity in the marine biosphere

Abstract

Explaining patterns of commonness and rarity is fundamental for understanding and managing biodiversity. Consequently, a key test of biodiversity theory has been how well ecological models reproduce empirical distributions of species abundances. However, ecological models with very different assumptions can predict similar species abundance distributions, whereas models with similar assumptions may generate very different predictions. This complicates inferring processes driving community structure from model fits to data. Here, we use an approximation that captures common features of "neutral" biodiversity models-which assume ecological equivalence of species-to test whether neutrality is consistent with patterns of commonness and rarity in the marine biosphere. We do this by analyzing 1,185 species abundance distributions from 14 marine ecosystems ranging from intertidal habitats to abyssal depths, and from the tropics to polar regions. Neutrality performs substantially worse than a classical nonneutral alternative: empirical data consistently show greater heterogeneity of species abundances than expected under neutrality. Poor performance of neutral theory is driven by its consistent inability to capture the dominance of the communities' most-abundant species. Previous tests showing poor performance of a neutral model for a particular system often have been followed by controversy about whether an alternative formulation of neutral theory could explain the data after all. However, our approach focuses on common features of neutral models, revealing discrepancies with a broad range of empirical abundance distributions. These findings highlight the need for biodiversity theory in which ecological differences among species, such as niche differences and demographic trade-offs, play a central role.etermining how biodiversity is maintained in ecological communities is a long-standing ecological problem. In species-poor communities, niche and demographic differences between species can often be estimated directly and used to infer the importance of alternative mechanisms of species coexistence (1-3). However, the "curse of dimensionality" prevents the application of such species-by-species approaches to high-diversity assemblages: the number of parameters in community dynamics models increases more rapidly than the amount of data, as species richness increases. Moreover, most species in high-diversity assemblages are very rare, further complicating the estimation of strengths of ecological interactions among species, or covariation in different species' responses to environmental fluctuations. Consequently, ecologists have focused instead on making assumptions about the overall distribution of demographic rates, niche sizes, or other characteristics of an assemblage, and then deriving the aggregate assemblage properties implied by those assumptions (4-8). One of the most commonly investigated of these assemblage-level properties is the species abundance distribution (SAD)-the pattern of commonness and rarity among ...

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