Beta diversity patterns derived from island biogeography theory

Abstract The Theory of Island Biogeography (TIB) has been successful in predicting alpha diversity patterns such as species-area relationships and species-abundance distributions. Although beta diversity (i.e. the dissimilarity of community composition) has long been recognized as an important element of the TIB and is crucial for understanding community assembly processes, it has never been formally incorporated into the theory. Here we derive theoretical predictions for the expected pairwise beta diversity values under a species-level neutral scenario where all species have equal colonization and extinction rates. We test these predictions for the avian community composition of 42 islands (and 93 species) in the Thousand Island Lake, China. We find that alpha diversity patterns alone do not distinguish a species-level neutral model from a non-neutral model. In contrast, beta diversity patterns clearly reject a species-level neutral model. We suggest that the presented theoretical integration beta diversity offers a powerful path for testing the presence of neutral processes in ecology and biogeography.