Review Glossary

Beta-diversity: also known as distance-decay; the probability as a function of distance between two individuals that they will be of the same species. Coalescence: a technique developed in population genetics for simulating or analytically solving properties of a sample of individuals by tracing their ancestry back to their common ancestors. Dispersal kernel: a statistical distribution describing stochastic dispersal events by giving the probability of dispersal as a function of distance. Dispersal limitation: a process that causes the location of an individual to be restricted in some sense by the location of its parent. In the common application of neutral models to tropical forest trees, this could be regarded as ‘seed limitation’. It has been further noted that ‘recruitment limitation ’ might be a better term because only individuals of adult reproductive age are usually modelled. In the context of the spatially implicit neutral model, dispersal limitation is given by parameter m, which measures the relative importance of regional dispersal processes from the metacommunity compared with loca