BIOPLAN POSTING 2002-2-9

David Duthie
02/22/02 04:07 PM

Dear BIOPLANNERS,

Biodiversity has lately become more a buzzword than a discipline firmly based in science, and books like the one described below make up only a small portion of my overflowing shelves.

Stephen Hubbell has a strong reputation and has been the architect of some pioneering long-term experiments in tree diversity in the tropics.  He obviously does not waste either evenings either, since he has compiled a 450 page thesis that threatens to really shake up community ecology.

Hubbell has applied Occam's Razor to species diversity data and asked: "How much of the biodiversity patterns we see around us can be explained by a theory based on "neutral" processes, rather than by complex niche and competition mechanisms".  The answer to Hubbell's question appears to be:  "An awful lot!"

This book could stimulate biodiversity theory in the same way the Motoo Kimura's neutral theory of evolution stimulated population genetics and led to a more robust evolutionary theory.

Below I am pasting the book description and a summary of Chapter 1.  The full text of Chapter 1 can be accessed at:

http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7105.html

The book is available via Princeton University Press, John Wiley in the UK, and Amazon.com

Happy reading

David Duthie
UNEP/GEF Biodiversity Enabling Activities
PO Box 30552
Gigiri
Nairobi
KENYA

Tel: +254-2-623717
Mobile: +254-72-786743
Fax: +254-2-624268
E-mail:  david.duthie@unep.org

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The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography

 Stephen P. Hubbell

 Paper | 2001 | $29.95 / £19.95
 Cloth | 2001 | $75.00 / £52.00
 448 pp. | 5 x 8 | 123 line illus.

 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.

 Stephen P. Hubbell is Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Georgia and Staff
 Scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He is the author of more
 than one hundred papers in tropical plant ecology, theoretical ecology, and plant-animal
 interactions. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pew Scholar Award in
 Conservation and the Environment. He is Chairman of the National Council for Science and the
 Environment (formerly the Committee for the National Institute for the Environment) and the
 inventor of Extinction: The Game of Ecology.

 Table of Contents

 Preface ix
 1.MacArthur and Wilson's Radical Theory 3
SUMMARY of Chaper 1
   1.Ecology currently lacks a good formal neutral theory. This book attempts to develop
      such a theory on the premise that it would greatly benefit the intellectual growth and
      maturation of ecology.
   2.Neutrality in this book is defined as per capita ecological equivalence among all
      individuals of every species in a given trophically defined community. This definition is
      not the same as "nothing going on" because it permits complex ecological interactions
      among individuals so long as all individuals obey the same interaction rules.
   3.A new neutral theory of biodiversity in a biogeographic context has been constructed on
      MacArthur and Wilson's now classical equilibrium theory of island biogeography. The
      original theory has been modified by including a process of speciation, and by changing
      the neutrality assumption from the species level to the individual level.
   4.Including speciation and changing the neutrality assumption enables the new theory to
      predict not only species richness on islands and on the mainland, but also the relative
      abundance of species, species-area relationships, and phylogeny under ecological drift,
      random dispersal, and random speciation.
   5.The theory predicts the existence of a fundamental bio-diversity number, [Omega], that
      appears throughout the theory at all spatial and temporal scales.
   6.The new theory renews the old challenge to reconcile two long-standing divergent
      perspectives on the nature of ecological communities: the niche-assembly perspective,
      and the dispersal-assembly perspective.
   7.The niche-assembly perspective asserts that ecological communities are limited
      membership assemblages of species that coexist at equilibrium under strict niche
      partitioning of limiting resources.
   8.The dispersal-assembly perspective asserts that ecological communities are open,
      continuously changing, nonequilibrium assemblages of species whose presence, absence,
      and relative abundance are governed by random speciation and dispersal, ecological
      drift, and extinction.
   9.The argument is long-standing because both perspectives have strong elements of truth.
      Taking the first steps to reconcile these divergent views of ecological nature is the
      underlying theme of this book.
 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
 Index 371
 

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