Complex ecological communities and the emergence of island species-area relationships
Journal article, 2022

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. The clustering of same-species individuals is central to our results, which we incorporate by modifying the self-interaction term in the generalized Lotka-Volterra equations. 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.

Complex ecological communities

Community assembly

Species-area relationship

Macroecology

Author

Ankit Vikrant

Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Physical Resource Theory

Martin Nilsson Jacobi

Physics, Chemistry and Biological Engineering along with Mathematics and Engineering Preparatory Year

Theoretical Ecology

1874-1738 (ISSN) 18741746 (eISSN)

Vol. 15 4 311-320

Subject Categories

Evolutionary Biology

Ecology

Law and Society

DOI

10.1007/s12080-022-00545-x

More information

Latest update

3/7/2024 9