The concerted emergence of well-known spatial and temporal ecological patterns in an evolutionary food web model in space

TL;DR

This paper introduces a spatially extended evolutionary food web model that reproduces multiple biodiversity patterns in space and time, highlighting the influence of trophic position on species range dynamics.

Contribution

It presents a novel spatial food web model that incorporates trophic structure, enabling the study of complex biodiversity patterns in large spatial systems.

Findings

Model reproduces biodiversity patterns like species abundance and range fluctuations.

Trophic position influences the evolution of species' geographic ranges.

Higher trophic levels are more restricted in survival and range size evolution.

Abstract

Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these models revolve around speciation, dispersal, and extinction, but they usually neglect trophic structure. Here, we propose and study a spatially extended evolutionary food web model that allows us to study large spatial systems with several trophic layers. Our computer simulations show that the model gives rise simultaneously to several biodiversity patterns in space and time, from species abundance distributions to the waxing and waning of geographic ranges. We find that trophic position in the network plays a crucial role when it comes to the time evolution of range sizes, because the trophic context restricts the occurrence and survival of species especially on higher trophic levels.