Coexistence in Metacommunities: The Regional Similarity Hypothesis

Species richness has historically been studied with a separation between smalland large-scale processes. Species diversity has been approached, on the one hand, from a local perspective, based on niche theory (Pianka 1966; MacArthur and Levins 1967; Schoener 1974), and on the other hand, from a regional perspective, through island biogeography (MacArthur and Wilson 1967), with no strong interactions between these two levels. At the local scale, interactions between competing species constrain diversity, and coexistence is a function of niche dimensions and resource heterogeneity (MacArthur and Levins 1967) or differences in species life-history traits as in colonization-competition trade-off models (Hastings 1980; Tilman 1994). At the regional scale, the theory of island biogeography (MacArthur and Wilson 1967) ignores local dynamics and considers local diversity as the result of regional processes such as chance events of immigration and extinction. There are no limits to diversity except those arising from the size of the regional species pool (continent size) and the constraints on immigration events (continent-island distance). This apparent contradiction has been named “MacArthur’s paradox” (Schoener 1983; Loreau and Mouquet 1999) because MacArthur’s contribution has been central in both niche theory (Mac-

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