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Coral reef diversity refutes the neutral theory of biodiversity

An Erratum to this article was published on 05 October 2006

Abstract

The global decline of coral reefs1,2 highlights the need to understand the mechanisms that regulate community structure and sustain biodiversity in these systems. The neutral theory, which assumes that individuals are demographically identical regardless of species, seeks to explain ubiquitous features of community structure and biodiversity patterns3,4,5. Here we present a test of neutral-theory predictions with the use of an extensive species-level data set of Indo-Pacific coral communities. We show that coral assemblages differ markedly from neutral-model predictions for patterns of community similarity and the relative abundance of species. Within local communities, neutral models do not fit relative abundance distributions as well as the classical log-normal distribution. Relative abundances of species across local communities also differ markedly from neutral-theory predictions: coral communities exhibit community similarity values that are far more variable, and lower on average, than the neutral theory can produce. Empirical community similarities deviate from the neutral model in a direction opposite to that predicted in previous critiques of the neutral theory6,7,8,9. Instead, our results support spatio-temporal environmental stochasticity as a major driver of diversity patterns on coral reefs10,11.

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Figure 1: Frequency distributions of Bray–Curtis similarities.
Figure 2: Bray–Curtis similarity distributions for neutral simulations and coral communities.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Barbosa, H. Cornell, R. Karlson, staff, students and volunteers of the Centre for Coral Reef Biodiversity, and the High Performance Computing staff, at James Cook University for assistance with various stages of this project. This work was supported by James Cook University, the Australian Research Council, and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal.

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Correspondence to Maria Dornelas.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Table 1

This Table shows the coral abundance distributions. Supplementary Tables 1 and 2 have been added post-publication of the original paper. See Erratum to original paper (doi:10.1038/nature05187). (XLS 392 kb)

Supplementary Table 2

This Table shows the similarity matrix. Supplementary Tables 1 and 2 have been added post-publication of the original paper. See Erratum to original paper (doi:10.1038/nature05187). (XLS 210 kb)

Supplementary Figure 1

This figure shows a comparison of the fit of the neutral model and the poisson lognormal to coral community species abundance distributions. (PDF 26 kb)

Supplementary Figure 2

These two figures show the frequency distribution of Bray-Curtis similarities for neutral model simulations: for different diversities (a) and different immigration rates (b). (PDF 56 kb)

Supplementary Figure 3

These three figures show the analysis of stabilization in similarity and diversity under neutral dynamics: mean (a) and standard deviation (b) of Bray-Curtis similarity, and % change in species richness (c) through time. (PDF 44 kb)

Supplementary Methods

This file contains additional information regarding the comparison between the poisson lognormal and the neutral model, and regarding similarity patterns under the neutral model. (DOC 38 kb)

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Dornelas, M., Connolly, S. & Hughes, T. Coral reef diversity refutes the neutral theory of biodiversity. Nature 440, 80–82 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04534

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