Impacts of dispersal limitation on temporal biodiversity patterns in a neutral model

• Impacts of various dispersal scenarios on local biodiversity were evaluated.
• Regional dispersal from metacommunity and local dispersal were distinguished.
• Species richness was higher in unlimited regional dispersal scenarios.
• Temporal community similarity was higher in limited regional dispersal scenarios.
• Regional dispersal played deterministic roles on structuring local biodiversity.

In this brief report, potential impacts of different dispersal assumptions on the temporal biodiversity patterns in a neutral model were evaluated using a simple spatially explicit lattice model. The results show that, immigration from metacommunity is much more important than local dispersal from neighboring sites to determine the temporal species richness of local neutral community. Such an observation was consistent over different initial configurations and various immigration rates. Moreover, the calculation of Jaccard's similarity index suggests that, when regional immigration is spatially limited (i.e., individuals of species can only disperse to the edge areas of the local community from the metacommunity), temporal species compositional similarity would be usually larger than those scenarios where regional immigration is not limited. That is, species replacement in spatially limited scenarios is much slower than those scenarios where dispersal of species is unlimited. In conclusion, regional dispersal limitation plays deterministic roles on structuring species diversity patterns in local neutral communities.