Complex ecological communities and the emergence of island species area relationships

TL;DR

This paper investigates how species-area relationships (SAR) in ecological communities can emerge from random community assembly models, explaining different empirical forms like power law and semi-log SAR based on immigration rates and interaction strengths.

Contribution

It introduces a reformulated Lotka-Volterra model incorporating area as a parameter, demonstrating how different SAR forms naturally arise from community assembly processes.

Findings

Power-law and semi-log SAR can emerge from community assembly dynamics.

Low immigration rates favor semi-log SAR, aligning with empirical observations.

Power-law SAR overestimates species richness on small, remote islands.

Abstract

It has been a century since the species-area relationship (SAR) was first proposed as a power law to explain how species richness scales with area. There have been many attempts to explain the origin of this predominant form. Apart from the power law, numerous empirical studies also report a semi-log form of the SAR, but very few have addressed its incidence. In this work, we test whether these relationships could emerge from the assembly of large random communities on island-like systems. We reformulate the generalized Lotka-Volterra model by introducing an area parameter that determines the species richness of the assembled communities. Our analysis demonstrates that the two most widely reported relationship forms can emerge due to differences in immigration rates and skewness towards weak interactions. We particularly highlight the incidence of the semi-log SAR for low immigration rates from a source pool, which is consistent with several previous empirical studies. The two SAR forms might show good fits to data over a large span of areas but a power-law overestimates species richness on smaller islands in remote archipelagoes.