Metacommunity-scale biodiversity regulation and the self-organized emergence of macroecological patterns

Abstract

There exist a number of key macroecological patterns whose ubiquity suggests the spatio-temporal structure of ecological communities is governed by some universal mechanisms. The nature of these mechanisms, however, remains poorly understood. Here we probe spatio-temporal patterns species richness and community composition using a simple metacommunity assembly model. Despite making no a priori assumptions regarding biotic spatial structure or the distribution of biomass across species, model metacommunities self-organize to reproduce well documented patterns including characteristic species abundance distributions, range size distributions and species area relations. Also in agreement with observations, species richness in our model attains an equilibrium despite continuous species turnover. Crucially, it is in the neighbourhood of the equilibrium that we observe the emergence of these key macroecological patterns. Biodiversity equilibria in models occur due to the onset of ecological structural instability, a population-dynamical mechanism. This strongly suggests a causal link between local community processes and macroecological phenomena.