Aims Neutral theory consists of a suite of models that assume ecological equivalence among individual organisms. They have been most commonly applied to tropical forest tree communities either as null models or as ...

Vascular epiphytes form a diverse group of almost 30 000 species, yet theory concerning their community structure is still largely lacking. We therefore employed the simplest models of biodiversity, (near-)neutral models, ...

Understanding the maintenance and origin of biodiversity is a formidable task, yet many ubiquitous ecological patterns are predicted by a surprisingly simple and widely studied neutral model that ignores functional differences ...