TY - JOUR T1 - Exploring the spatially explicit predictions of the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/003657 SP - 003657 AU - D.J. McGlinn AU - X. Xiao AU - J. Kitzes AU - E.P. White Y1 - 2014/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/03/30/003657.abstract N2 - The Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology (METE) predicts patterns of species abundance, size, and spatial structure. The spatial component of the theory successfully predicts diversity patterns across scales, but has focused on patterns that ignore inter-site spatial correlations. We developed a semi-recursive version of METE’s spatially explicit predictions for the distance decay of community similarity and compared it to empirical data. The version of METE we examined successfully captured the general form of the distance decay relationships, a negative power function, but over-predicted the degree and rate of species turnover. Our results suggest that while METE accurately predicts species occupancy and the species-area relationship, its semi-recursive form does not accurately characterize spatially-explicit patterns of correlation. These results also suggest that tests of spatial theories using only the species-area relationship may yield good fits despite significant deviations in important aspects of spatial structure. ER -