ABSTRACT
The structure of communities is influenced by many ecological and evolutionary processes, but the way this manifests in classic biodiversity patterns often remains unclear. Here we aim to distinguish the ecological footprint of selection through competition or environmental filtering, from that of neutral processes that are invariant to species identity. We build on existing Massive Eco-evolutionary Synthesis Simulations (MESS), which uses information from three biodiversity axes – species abundances; genetic diversity; and trait variation – to distinguish between mechanistic processes. In order to correctly detect and characterise competition, 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. Our results are qualitatively different to those of previous work that only compares each individual’s trait to the community mean. We find that neutral forces receive much less support from real systems when trait data is available and incorporated into the inference algorithm. We conclude that gathering more different types of data could be the key to unravelling the mechanisms of community assembly.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
We have added a new test of our inference method to support its relevance. We now show that the confusion matrix for inferences realised with all 3 data types (genetic data, species abundances and traits) gives significantly better results than those built with only pairs of data axes. We believe this test provides much better evidence for the use of a model considering more data types (See Fig. 7) to infer underlying processes. Furthermore, we also investigated our inference results in more detail to provide a better explanation for the discrepancy between our results and the original results in previous work.
