Additionally, in the last 50 years, there has been a reassessment of the dominant paradigm of community organization. This call is urgent as we live in an age of major changes in biodiversity across the Earth via landscape transformation or migration ( Dornelas et al., 2014). It also provides a powerful framework to explore significant ideas in ecology, such as the drift of ecological communities into evolutionary time.Įmpirical studies of ecological communities often call for a greater emphasis on time and on longer time intervals ( Ripa and Lundberg, 2000 Hastings, 2004 Magurran, 2007). 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. 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. 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. Here, we develop the niche-hypervolume concept of the community into a powerful model of community dynamics. 2Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC, United Statesĭifferent 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.
1Department of Biological Applications & Technology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece.
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