All species ecologically equivalent — diversity driven by drift, speciation & dispersal
Key assumption: All individuals of all species are demographically identical (per-capita birth/death/migration rates equal).
Unified Neutral Biodiversity Number: θ = 2Jm·ν — controls species richness in the metacommunity.
SAR & RSA: Neutral theory predicts species-area relationships and logseries-like rank abundance distributions matching tropical forest data.
Grid: Each cell = one individual. On death, replaced by local birth (1−m) or dispersal from metacommunity (m). Watch species drift to extinction or invasion.