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

Michaela Hamm,Barbara Drossel

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-84077-0

Michaela Hamm, Barbara Drossel

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-84077-0

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Journal: Scientific Reports	Publication Date: Feb 25, 2021
Citations: 8	License type: open-access

Affiliation: Technical University of Darmstadt

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.

Highlights

Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time
Another “pattern”, or rather a rule, of ecology was formulated as the law of constant e xtinction[14], which says that the extinction probability of a species does not depend on its age because species co-evolve in ever lasting competition and can never gain advantage over competitors (“Red Queen hypothesis”)
We have introduced and investigated a spatially explicit evolutionary food web model that allows us to explore the distribution of species in space and time, as well as the waxing and waning of species ranges with time

Summary

Introduction

Ecological systems show a variety of characteristic patterns of biodiversity in space and time. 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. The relative importance of the impact of the environment and of competition was studied finding that the tip of the curve is more influenced by competition whereas the rising and falling flanks are more influenced by environmental c onditions[11] Another “pattern”, or rather a rule, of ecology was formulated as the law of constant e xtinction[14], which says that the extinction probability of a species does not depend on its age because species co-evolve in ever lasting competition and can never gain advantage over competitors (“Red Queen hypothesis”). When taking range expansion into account, the Red Queen hypothesis must be rejected or at least modified because there is a clear indication that species occupying larger ranges have smaller chances of e xtinction[15]

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