Ciência

Ecology Letters, (2004) 7: 1–15

doi: 10.1046/j.1461-0248.2003.00554.x

IDEAS AND PERSPECTIVES

A comprehensive framework for global patterns in biodiversity
Abstract The present study proposes to reconcile the different spatial and temporal scales of regional species production and local constraint on species richness. Although interactions between populations rapidly achieve equilibrium and limit membership in ecological communities locally, these interactions occur over heterogeneous environments within large regions, where the populations of species are stably regulated through competition and habitat selection. Consequently, exclusion of species from a region depends on long-term regional-scale environmental change or evolutionary change among interacting populations, bringing species production and extinction onto the same scale and establishing a link between local and regional processes. Keywords Beta diversity, community, competition, diversity, extinction, habitat breadth, local processes, regional processes, speciation, species richness. Ecology Letters (2004) 7: 1–15 many minds the two were incompatible. Ecologists and population biologists largely supported explanations for diversity patterns based on species interactions within communities; systematists and biogeographers were reluctant to abandon historical explanations, but mostly remained in the background (see Whittaker 1972; Rosenzweig 1975, 1978; Connor & Simberloff 1979). Three issues aggravated this division between historical and ecological approaches to diversity patterns. First, historical hypotheses were considered by many to be untestable and thus not valid scientific hypotheses (e.g. Francis & Currie 1998). Second, experimental and model systems demonstrated that ecological interactions ran to steady-state conditions too rapidly for slower evolutionary processes to have a local impact (Pielou 1977). Third, strong correlations between diversity and local ecological conditions were