An analytical approach to spatio-temporal dynamics of neutral community models.

We propose a spatial version of the neutral community model on a network of interconnected patches. The dynamical equations for the abundances and higher order moments of the abundances are established. Due to the neutrality assumption these equations are autonomous, enabling an exact analysis of spatio-temporal dynamics. We compute local (i.e., inside a patch) and global (i.e., between patches) diversities, and illustrate our results with two examples: (1) a non-spatial community, for which we recover previous results, and (2) a model with a finite number of patches which are all connected to each other with equal migration intensity. We discuss the relevance of this model for experiments in microbial ecology.