A unified model of species abundance, genetic diversity, and functional diversity reveals the mechanisms structuring ecological communities
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Biodiversity accumulates hierarchically by means of ecological and evolutionary processes and feedbacks. Within ecological communities drift, dispersal, speciation, and selection operate simultaneously to shape patterns of biodiversity. Reconciling the relative importance of these is hindered by current models and inference methods, which tend to focus on a subset of processes and their resulting predictions. Here we introduce massive ecoevolutionary synthesis simulations (MESS), a unified mechanistic model of community assembly, rooted in classic island biogeography theory, which makes temporally explicit joint predictions across three biodiversity data axes: (i) species richness and abundances, (ii) population genetic diversities, and (iii) trait variation in a phylogenetic context. Using simulations we demonstrate that each data axis captures information at different timescales, and that integrating these axes enables discriminating among previously unidentifiable community assembly models. MESS is unique in generating predictions of community-scale genetic diversity, and in characterizing joint patterns of genetic diversity, abundance, and trait values. MESS unlocks the full potential for investigation of biodiversity processes using multidimensional community data including a genetic component, such as might be produced by contemporary eDNA or metabarcoding studies. We combine MESS with supervised machine learning to fit the parameters of the model to real data and infer processes underlying how biodiversity accumulates, using communities of tropical trees, arthropods, and gastropods as case studies that span a range of data availability scenarios, and spatial and taxonomic scales.
Date Issued
2021-10-23
Date Acceptance
2021-09-07
Citation
Molecular Ecology Resources, 2021, 21 (8), pp.2782-2800
ISSN
1471-8278
Publisher
Wiley
Start Page
2782
End Page
2800
Journal / Book Title
Molecular Ecology Resources
Volume
21
Issue
8
Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Authors. Molecular Ecology Resources published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000710080900001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
Subjects
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
BIODIVERSITY
community ecology
community genetic diversity
community phylogenetics
comparative phylogeography
DIVERSIFICATION
Ecology
Environmental Sciences & Ecology
EVOLUTION
Evolutionary Biology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
NEUTRAL THEORY
PATTERNS
PHYLOGENIES
population genetics
POPULATION-GENETICS
RATES
SCALE
Science & Technology
SELECTION
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2021-09-27