ABSTRACT
The structure of communities is influenced by many processes, both ecological and evolutionary, but the influence of these processes on biodiversity patterns often remains unclear. The aim of this work is to distinguish the ecological footprint of differing formulations of competition and environmental filtering from that of neutral processes that are invariant to species identity. We build our work on “massive eco-evolutionary synthesis simulations” (MESS), which uses information from three biodiversity axes – species richness and abundance; population genetic diversity; and trait variation in a phylogenetic context – to distinguish between processes with a mechanistic model. We add a new form of competition to MESS that explicitly compares the traits of each pair of individuals, allowing us to distinguish between inter- and intra-specific competition. We find that this addition is essential to properly detect and characterise competition, yielding different results than the existing simpler model that only compares species’ traits to the community mean. We find from model selection that neutral forces receive much less support from real systems when trait data is available and incorporated into the inference algorithm.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
