Bridging discrete and continuous formalisms for biodiversity quantification

Abstract: Several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to explain observed biodiversity patterns, ranging from the classical niche-based theories, mainly employing a continuous formalism, to neutral theories, based on statistical mechanics of discrete communities. Differences in the descriptions of biodiversity can arise due to the discrete or continuous nature of the underlying models and the way internal or external perturbations appear in their formulations. Here, we trace the effects of stochastic population dynamics on biodiversity, from the scale of the individuals to the community and based on both discrete and continuous representations of the system, by consistently using measures of community diversity like the species abundance distribution and the rank abundance curve and applying them to both discrete and continuous populations. A novel measure, the community abundance distribution, is introduced to facilitate the comparison across different levels of description, from microscopic to macroscopic. Using a simple birth and death process and an interacting population model, we highlight discrepancies in their discrete and continuous distributions and discuss relevant implications for the analysis of rare species and extinction dynamics. Quantitative consideration of these issues is useful for better understanding of the contributions of non-neutral processes and the mathematical approximations to various measures of biodiversity.