Temporal beta-diversity patterns are highly dependent on fundamental
parameters of neutral dynamics
Abstract
Temporal changes in community composition are a facet of biodiversity
change and are referred to as temporal beta diversity. Macroecological
patterns of temporal beta diversity have gained attention because of the
recent biodiversity crisis. However, no one has seriously studied how
temporal beta diversity differs from spatial beta diversity, and the
most basic neutral dynamics and temporal beta-diversity patterns remain
unknown. Therefore, the present study aimed to reveal the basic
properties of temporal beta-diversity patterns under neutral dynamics
and identify their differences from those of spatial beta-diversity
patterns. A simulation of neutral dynamics was conducted to test the
parameter dependency of temporal beta-diversity patterns. Specifically,
four fundamental parameters of the neutral model—the fundamental
biodiversity number, local community size, mortality rate, and
immigration rate—were studied. To describe the form of the simulated
temporal distance-decay patterns based on both the Bray–Curtis and
Sørensen dissimilarity indices, a three-parameter negative exponential
function was fitted for each simulated dissimilarity matrix. The
negative exponential function was successfully fitted to all the
simulated results and three estimated parameters and the intercepts of
the function were plotted along the change in the four parameters of the
neutral model. The simulated results demonstrated that upper limits
exist in the temporal distance-decay patterns; thus, the temporal
distance-decay curves saturate before reaching a completely dissimilar
state. Additionally, the form of the curve strongly depends on the four
parameters of the neutral model. These results suggest that the
relationship between local communities and virtual species pools differs
in temporal and spatial beta diversity. Specifically, they suggest that
the species pool is spatially variable but temporally constant.