Biodiversity on island chains: neutral model simulations

TL;DR

This study uses neutral model simulations to analyze biodiversity patterns across island chains, revealing that biodiversity decreases along the chain and highlighting challenges in distinguishing dispersal mechanisms using static distributions.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation of neutral ecology on island chains, demonstrating how biodiversity varies and the difficulty of inferring dispersal mechanisms from static data.

Findings

Biodiversity decreases along the island chain.

Taxon abundance distributions show subtle differences.

Static distributions may not clearly distinguish dispersal mechanisms.

Abstract

A neutral ecology model is simulated on an island chain, in which neighbouring islands can exchange individuals but only the first island is able to receive immigrants from a metacommunity. It is found by several measures that biodiversity decreases along the chain, being highest for the first island. Subtle changes in taxon abundance distributions can be detected when islands in the chain are compared to diversity-matched single islands. The results potentially apply to human microbial diversity, but highlight the difficulty of using static single-site taxon abundance distributions to discriminate between dispersal limitation mechanisms.