The Dynamic Hypercube as a Niche Community Model
Different models of community dynamics, such as the MacArthur–Wilson theory of island biogeography and Hubbell’s neutral theory, have given us useful insights into the workings of ecological communities. Here, we develop the niche-hypervolume concept of the community into a powerful model of community dynamics. We describe the community’s size through the volume of the hypercube and the dynamics of the populations in it through the fluctuations of the axes of the niche hypercube on different timescales. While the community’s size remains constant, the relative volumes of the niches within it change continuously, thus allowing the populations of different species to rise and fall in a zero-sum fashion. This dynamic hypercube model reproduces several key patterns in communities: lognormal species abundance distributions, 1/f-noise population abundance, multiscale patterns of extinction debt and logarithmic species-time curves. It also provides a powerful framework to explore significant ideas in ecology, such as the drift of ecological communities into evolutionary time.
Duke Scholars
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- 4102 Ecological applications
- 3104 Evolutionary biology
- 3103 Ecology
- 0603 Evolutionary Biology
- 0602 Ecology
Citation
Published In
DOI
EISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Related Subject Headings
- 4102 Ecological applications
- 3104 Evolutionary biology
- 3103 Ecology
- 0603 Evolutionary Biology
- 0602 Ecology