Species area relationships and the multi-type voter model

The 2D multitype voter model with mutations is a simple model for macroecological patterns. The dependence of the number of types on the sampled area is still under debate. With extensive numerical simulations, we managed to explore very low values of the mutation rate (one event every 10-100 billion births). The result is that, in the low speciation limit, the number of types grows as a power of the area, with an exponent that depends logarithmically on the mutation rate. I will discuss the biological relevance of this behavior.

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