"Turnover of rare and abundant species due to unstructured ecological differences"Mallmin, EmilEcological communities tend to be composed of a few abundant species and many rare ones. Yet which species are rare and which are abundant varies both in space and in time, with limited predictability. An understanding of the origin of such ubiquitous macroecological patterns can be facilitated by analytically tractable many-species dynamical models. A celebrated (and much debated) exemplar is Neutral Theory, based on the assumption of strict per-capita ecological equivalence of species. However, it is now recognized that neutral drift cannot explain the extent of temporal abundance fluctuations in real communities. In this talk, I will present recent modelling results on how unstructured ecological differences between species --- in their responses to stochastic environmental factors, or in terms of strong and heterogeneous within-community interactions that induce chaotic dynamics --- may account for the common unevenness and compositional turnover of communities. |
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