The first of these processes will be considered biodiversity-neutral at the alpha level, and the latter two will go unnoticed in standard monitoring of diversity at classical species level.
In its extreme case, this regional perspective is captured in neutral biodiversity models that assume functional equivalency among species across all habitats [8], [9], [10].
The neutral theory of biodiversity (Macarthur and Wilson 1963 19677; Hubbell 2001) is a theory about the "ecological drift" of biodiversity, both in terms of an area or community's number of species (the species richness), and in terms of its makeup (the relative species abundance).
These policies suggest annual crops and temporary grasslands exhibit a negative or neutral impact on biodiversity.
In this report, I incorporate local speciation into neutral theory of biodiversity to predict species abundance distribution patterns.
I will first review the neutral theory of biodiversity, which was advanced as a null model in macroecology for predicting patterns of species diversity in the absence of natural selection (Macarthur and Wilson 1963 19677; Hubbell 2001).
The simulations assumed that the probability of immigration was a linear function of mainland abundance and distance to islands, similar to the equilibrium theory of island biogeography and the unified neutral theory of biodiversity.
The neutral theory of biodiversity has successfully explained the observed composition of many ecological communities but it relies on strict demographic equivalence among species and provides no room for evolutionary processes such as selection and adaptation.
Whereas using the neutral theory of biodiversity at the level of cultural diversity establishes the expectation for a global relationship among human cultures as a function of geographic area and latitude, the geographic dynamics of specific cultural traits is also of interest.
This article compares 97 contemporary indigenous language communities from around the world, and 24 of their cultural traditions, to help determine whether human cultures and their cultural traits are proportionately dispersed, as predicted by the neutral theory of biodiversity, or whether they show non-proportionalities that could be explained with evolutionary reasoning.
We suggest that the neutral theory of biodiversity cannot account for the observed differences in the spatial arrangement of wetland species, which thus require a non-neutral description.
