Speciation is the "elephant in the room" of community ecology. As the
ultimate source of biodiversity, its integration in ecology's theoretical
corpus is necessary to understand community assembly. Yet, speciation is often
completely ignored or stripped of its spatial dimension. Recent approaches
based on network theory have allowed ecologists to effectively model complex
landscapes. In this study, we use this framework to model allopatric and
parapatric speciation in networks of communities and focus on the relationship
between speciation, richness, and the spatial structure of communities. We find
a strong opposition between speciation and local richness, with speciation
being more common in isolated communities and local richness being higher in
more connected communities. Unlike previous models, we also find a transition
to a positive relationship between speciation and local richness when dispersal
is low and the number of communities is small. Also, we use several measures of
centrality to characterize the effect of network structure on diversity. The
degree, the simplest measure of centrality, is found to be the best predictor
of local richness and speciation, although it loses some of its predictive
power as connectivity grows. Our framework shows how a simple neutral model can
be combined with network theory to reveal complex relationships between
speciation, richness, and the spatial organization of populations.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, 50 reference
