General models of ecological diversification. II. Simulations and empirical applications

Models of functional ecospace diversification within life-habit frameworks (functional-trait spaces) are increasingly used across community ecology, functional ecology, and paleoecology. In general, these models can be represented by four basic processes, three that have driven causes and one that occurs through a passive process. The driven models include redundancy (caused by forms of functional canalization), partitioning (specialization), and expansion (divergent novelty), but they also share important dynamical similarities with the passive neutral model. In this second of two companion articles, Monte Carlo simulations of these models are used to illustrate their basic statistical dynamics across a range of data structures and implementations. Ecospace frameworks with greater numbers of characters (functional traits) and ordered (multistate) character types provide more distinct dynamics and greater ability to distinguish the models, but the general dynamics tend to be congruent a...