Despite its supreme importance and the threat of its global crash, biodiversity remains poorly understood both empirically and theoretically. This ambitious book presents a new, general neutral theory to explain the origin, maintenance, and loss of biodiversity in a biogeographic context.
Until now biogeography (the study of the geographic distribution of species) and biodiversity (the study of species richness and relative species abundance) have had largely disjunct intellectual histories. In this book, Stephen Hubbell develops a formal mathematical theory that unifies these two fields. When a speciation process is incorporated into Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson's now classical theory of island biogeography, the generalized theory predicts the existence of a universal, dimensionless biodiversity number. In the theory, this fundamental biodiversity number, together with the migration or dispersal rate, completely determines the steady-state distribution of species richness and relative species abundance on local to large geographic spatial scales and short-term to evolutionary time scales.
Although neutral, Hubbell's theory is nevertheless able to generate many nonobvious, testable, and remarkably accurate quantitative predictions about biodiversity and biogeography. In many ways Hubbell's theory is the ecological analog to the neutral theory of genetic drift in genetics. The unified neutral theory of biogeography and biodiversity should stimulate research in new theoretical and empirical directions by ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and biogeographers.
Highly innovative and insightful. . . . Ideas are conveyed clearly and the addition of summary points at the end of each chapter facilitates assimilation."--Richard T. Busing, Ecological Engineering
"Hubbell's book is a very exciting one, deeply original, based on extensive field data, and convincing in its 'simple' explanations of many broad-scale patterns in biodiversity and biogeography. It will probably cause controversies, but primarily stimulate further research."--Gottfried Jetschke, Ecology
"[This] is a rich book about an idea that has the power to re-produce generic patterns and that will be in the back of your mind when you, again, try to make sense of the plethora of articles on species diversity, abundance and distribution."--Carsten F. Dormann, Basic and Applied Ecology
"A rich book about an idea that has the power to re-produce generic patterns and that will be in the back of your mind when you, again, try to make sense of the plethora of articles on species diversity, abundance and distribution. . . . Once you start reading it, you will find it not a page too long."--Carsten F. Dormann, Basic Applied Ecology
"This is an important contribution to the development of a much sought-after explanation of pattern and process in an increasingly threatened global resource."--Michael E. Meadows, Environmental Conservation
"Hubbell has produced a book for all those who think about how communities are put together, even the not so mathematically minded. . . . [It] is sure to influence how community ecology is done for years to come."--Sandra Knapp, Biological Conservation
"This provocative and enlightening work, deeply original and supported by some of the most extensive field research ever conducted in biology, will be regarded as one of the most important contributions to ecology and biogeography of the past half century."--Edward O. Wilson, author of Biodiversity
Table of Contents:
1.MacArthur and Wilson's Radical Theory 3
2.On Current Theories of Relative Species Abundance 30
3.Dynamical Models of the Relative Abundance of Species 48
4.Local Community Dynamics under Ecological Drift 76
5.Metacommunity Dynamics and the Unified Theory 113
6.The Unified Theory and Dynamical Species-Area Relationships 152
7.Metapopulations and Biodiversity on the Metacommunity Landscape 202
8.Speciation, Phylogeny, and the Evolution of Metacommunity Biodiversity 231
9.Sampling, Parameter Estimation, and the Generality of the Unified Theory 281
10.Reconciling Dispersal-Assembly and Niche-Assembly Theories 319
Literature Cited 347
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