Data from: A unified model explains commonness and rarity on coral reefs

Abundance patterns in ecological communities have important implications
for biodiversity maintenance and ecosystem functioning. However,
ecological theory has been largely unsuccessful at capturing multiple
macroecological abundance patterns simultaneously. Here, we propose a
parsimonious model that unifies widespread ecological relationships
involving local aggregation, species-abundance distributions, and species
associations, and we test this model against the metacommunity structure
of reef-building corals and coral reef fishes across the western and
central Pacific. For both corals and fishes, the unified model
simultaneously captures extremely well local species-abundance
distributions, interspecific variation in the strength of spatial
aggregation, patterns of community similarity, species accumulation, and
regional species richness, performing far better than alternative models
also examined here and in previous work on coral reefs. Our approach
contributes to the development of synthetic theory for large-scale
patterns of community structure in nature, and to addressing ongoing
challenges in biodiversity conservation at macroecological scales.