Effect of the spatial structure on relative species abundance distribution for neutral theory in ecology

The distribution patterns of the relative species abundance (RSA) in ecological community have been argued by ecologists for more than half a century.  Especially, “neutral theory in ecology” generalized by Hubbell (2001) has been believed as one of the most attractive and most influential candidates to explain them, and therefore the validity of this theory has been investigated and discussed from various points of view.  In our presentation, we consider metacommunity dynamics on lattice space as the regularly arranged habitat and incorporate the effect of spatial structure into dispersal modes, i.e. seed propagation or vegetative propagation, in neutral theory and evaluate the goodness-of-fit for the field data.   As a result, it is clarified for the near dispersal mode (vegetative propagation) or the mixed strategy (both dispersal modes with constant ratio) to obtain better fit to the data.