Predicting Global Biodiversity Patterns from Theory

The previous chapter developed a global theory of biodiversity incorporating gradients in ambient temperature and habitat area or productivity. It showed that a metacommunity model implementation of the theory can reproduce first-order patterns of declining species richness from the tropics to the poles in an idealized cylindrical ocean. This chapter tests the theory in a more realistic setting by fitting the neutral-metabolic metacommunity model to a global equal-area grid with a more realistic spatial structure. The rationale here is to explore whether the communities that evolve in a simple theoretical model can reproduce observed patterns of species richness in the real world, and reconcile the contrasting patterns seen in coastal, pelagic, deep-sea, and terrestrial habitats.