Community-level birth rate: a missing link between ecology, evolution and diversity

We propose a conceptual model to explain the variation in species richness in local communities and in build-up of regional species pools over time. The idea is that the opportunity for new species to enter a community (its invasibility) determines the present richness of that community as well as the long-term build-up of a species pool by speciation and migration. We propose that a community’s invasibility is determined by the turnover rate of reproductive genets in the community, which we call the ‘community-level birth rate’. The faster the turn-over, the more species will accumulate per unit time and per unit community size (number of genets) at a given per-birth rate of immigration and speciation. Spatially discrete communities inhabiting similar environments sum up to metacommunities, whose inhabitant species constitute the regional species pool. We propose that the size of a regional species pool is determined by the aggregat