The concerted emergence of well-known spatial and temporal ecological patterns in an evolutionary food web model in space

ABSTRACT Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these models revolve around speciation, dispersal, and ex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inbioRxiv
Main Authors Hamm, Michaela, Drossel, Barbara
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Cold Spring Harbor Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 18.10.2019
Subjects
Biodiversity
Biogeography
Dispersal
Evolution
Food chains
Food webs
Island biogeography
Mathematical models
Speciation
Trophic levels
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Summary:ABSTRACT Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. It is a challenge for theory to find models that can reproduce and explain the observed patterns. Since the advent of island biogeography these models revolve around speciation, dispersal, and extinction, but they usually neglect trophic structure. Here, we propose and study a spatially extended evolutionary food web model that allows us to study large spatial systems with several trophic layers. Our computer simulations show that the model gives rise simultaneously to several biodiversity patterns in space and time, from species abundance distributions to the waxing and waning of geographic ranges. We find that trophic position in the network plays a crucial role when it comes to the time evolution of range sizes, because the trophic context restricts the occurrence and survival of species especially on higher trophic levels.
DOI:10.1101/810390