A niche remedy for the dynamical problems of neutral theory

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified framework combining niche theory and neutral theory to better predict community dynamics, addressing key limitations of neutral theory regarding species lifetimes and ages.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated model that links ecological population models, enabling quantitative analysis of selection, drift, and dispersal effects.

Findings

Niche stabilizing forces extend species lifetimes.

The framework predicts more realistic species age distributions.

It unifies various ecological models into a comprehensive approach.

Abstract

We demonstrate how niche theory and Hubbell's original formulation of neutral theory can be blended together into a general framework modeling the combined effects of selection, drift, speciation, and dispersal on community dynamics. This framework connects many seemingly unrelated ecological population models, and allows for quantitative predictions to be made about the impact of niche stabilizing and destabilizing forces on population extinction times and abundance distributions. In particular, the existence of niche stabilizing forces in our blended framework can simultaneously resolve two major problems with the dynamics of neutral theory, namely predictions of species lifetimes that are too short and species ages that are too long.