Dear Tyler, Since Hubbell's book, there have been so many papers on neutral theory that, I agree, it looks quite challenging to select just one. Instead I have prepared a doable short list for a reading group for a semester.
What is challenging for me it is not to select a short list of basic contributions, but perhaps not to be biased. I will try it, but if some of you think that fundamental contributions are missing, go ahead... this is what Ecolog list is for! I will try to simplify quite a bit in order to come up with a rather short reading list. For instance, I am going to skip old papers that also implemented neutral approaches before Hubbells' book. However, I honestly think that you cannot skip Hubbell's book, at least, the following three chapters: (1) Chapter 1 on the fundamentals of the theory and how it extends MacArthur and Wilson's theory. (2) Chapter 2 on previous theories trying to explain why abundance is so unevenly ditributed across species in any given community and in which sense neutral theory differs from them. (3) Chapter 10 on which Hubbell advances the main criticisms of neutral theory and suggests that his book "is only a beginning" and that "There are many theoretical and empirical paths to explore..." These chapters are beautifully written and still serve as the best introduction to Hubbell's neutral theory. Then I would recommend to go on with two general reviews: (4) J. Chave (2004) Neutral theory and community ecology. Ecology Letters. 7: 241-253 (5) D. Alonso, R. S. Etienne, and A. J. McKane (2006). The merits of neutral theory. TREE: The five readings above make up a nice and smooth introduction to Neutral theory. Then I would divide papers in two subgroups: theoretical developments and empirical evaluation. A. Theoretical developments. Further developments on neutral theory since Hubbell's book can be summarized in 5 stepping stones: 1. The emphasis on the sampling nature of the theory, the connection to previous sampling theories in ecology, and Etienne sampling formula. (6) D. Alonso and A. J. McKane (2004). Sampling Hubbell's Neutral Theory of Biodiversity. Ecology Letters, 7: 901-906. (7) R. S. Etienne and D. Alonso (2005). A dispersal-limited sampling theory for species and alleles. Ecology Letters, 8: 1147-1156. 2. The spatially implicit model and the stochastic master equation description for community dynamics, in particular, the species independence assumption developed by Volkov and collaborators and the stochastic patch occupancy approach developed by Kadmon and Allouche. Key sample papers about that are: (8) I. Volkov, J. Banavar, S. Hubbell and A. Maritan 2009. Infering species interactions in tropical forests. PNAS 106(33): 13854-13859. (9) R. Kadmon and O. Allouche (2009) Demographic analysis of Hubbell's neutral theory of biodiversity. Journal of Theoretical Biology 258(2): 274-280. Again, if you read these latest ones, you will be rather up to date. From the reference list there, you can always go back to the oldest ones where the seminal ideas were presented. 3. Spatially explicit dynamics on an infinite area based on coalescence developed by Rosindell and Cornell, which allows for detailed predictions for species-area relations. (10) J. Rosindell and S. J. Cornell (2009) Species ares curves, neutral models and long-distance dispersal. Ecology 90(7): 1743-1750 4. The size-structured neutral approach develped by O'Dwyer and collaborators: (11) J. P. O'Dwyer, J. K. Lake, A. Ostling, V. M. Savage, and J. L. Green. (2009) An integrative framework for stochastic, size-structured community assembly. PNAS 106: 6170-6175. 5. Metacommunity assembly and new neutral speciation models. Arguably the point mutation mode for speciation was one of the weekest points of neutral theory. This generated clearly unrealistic predictions. New work has been done to overcome those. Most of this work has been done by Rosindell, Etienne, Melian, and others. These papers are still under review. By the time you reach this point, some of this work will be hopefully generally available. B. Testing Neutral Theory. Hundreds and hundreds of papers have been written to evaluate both conceptually and empirically neutral theory, but if I had to chose just a few I would go for Brian McGill's papers, who was actually a pioneer in testing neutral theory. The sample I have chosen reviews all previous empirical evaluations and establishes criteria for robust evaluations. (12) B. McGill (2006) Empirical evaluation of neutral theory. Ecology 87(6): 1411-1423 I think you can organized these papers nicely in 10 reading sessions: 1. The philosophy of the theory: (1)+(2) 2. General reviews: (4)+(5) 3. Theoretical developments I: (6)+(7) 4. Theoretical developments II. On the species independence assumption. (8) 5. Theoretical developments III. On the stochastic patch occupancy approach. (9) 6. Theoretical developments IV. On the spatially explicity approach (10) 7. Theoretical developments V. On the size-structured approach. (11) 8. Theoretical developments VI. On speciation dynamics under neutrality (to appear) 9. Testing neutral theory (12). 10. The last session on Chapter 10 in Hubbell's book would serve to recap and discuss back again basic assumptions, criticisms and possibilities for further extensions. (3) If you follow this list one session every other week, you will become a neutral theory expert in a semester. David. -- David Alonso Community and Conservation Ecology Group Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Studies University of Groningen PO Box 14, 9750 AA Haren, The Netherlands Email: d.alo...@rug.nl http://www.ourbiosphere.org/dalonso/ On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 23:48 -0500, Tyler Hicks wrote: > Hello, > > We are currently working through a series on seminal papers in ecology in a > grad student discussion group and I thought it would be pertinent to include > a paper and discussion on the unified neutral theory of biodiversity and > biogeography. Instead of making everyone read Hubbell's book I was wondering > if anyone could recommend any papers that would best present and discuss this > theory? > > Cheers, > > Tyler > > > Tyler L. Hicks > > > Ph.D. Student > Washington State University Vancouver > > E-mail: tyler_hi...@wsu.edu > Web Page: http://thingswithwings.org > > "We were certainly uncertain. At least, I'm pretty sure I am." - Modest Mouse > > > _________________________________________________________________ > New Windows 7: Find the right PC for you. Learn more. > http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pc-scout/default.aspx?CBID=wl&ocid=PID24727::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WWL_WIN_pcscout:102009
