{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/linking-statistical-and-ecological-theory","title":"Linking statistical and ecological theory: Hubbell's unified neutral theory of biodiversity as a hierarchical Dirichlet process","arxiv_id":"1410.4038","date":"2020-09-13","proceeding":null,"authors":[],"abstract":"Neutral models which assume ecological equivalence between species provide\nnull models for community assembly. In Hubbell's Unified Neutral Theory of\nBiodiversity (UNTB), many local communities are connected to a single\nmetacommunity through differing immigration rates. Our ability to fit the full\nmulti-site UNTB has hitherto been limited by the lack of a computationally\ntractable and accurate algorithm. We show that a large class of neutral models\nwith this mainland-island structure but differing local community dynamics\nconverge in the large population limit to the hierarchical Dirichlet process.\nUsing this approximation we developed an efficient Bayesian fitting strategy\nfor the multi-site UNTB. We can also use this approach to distinguish between\nneutral local community assembly given a non-neutral metacommunity distribution\nand the full UNTB where the metacommunity too assembles neutrally. We applied\nthis fitting strategy to both tropical trees and a data set comprising 570,851\nsequences from 278 human gut microbiomes. The tropical tree data set was\nconsistent with the UNTB but for the human gut neutrality was rejected at the\nwhole community level. However, when we applied the algorithm to gut microbial\nspecies within the same taxon at different levels of taxonomic resolution, we\nfound that species abundances within some genera were almost consistent with\nlocal community assembly. This was not true at higher taxonomic ranks. This\nsuggests that the gut microbiota is more strongly niche constrained than\nmacroscopic organisms, with different groups adopting different functional\nroles, but within those groups diversity may at least partially be maintained\nby neutrality.We also observed a negative correlation between body mass index\nand immigration rates within the family Ruminococcaceae.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.4038v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.4038v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"linking-statistical-and-ecological-theory","repo_url":"https://github.com/microbiome/NMGS","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}