Ecosystem shuffle: the neutRal R package to simulate species dance moves

Understanding how biodiversity patterns emerge from simple ecological processes remains a central challenge in community ecology. Neutral theory provides a parsimonious framework in which species are assumed to be ecologically equivalent and community dynamics arise from stochastic processes such as dispersal, immigration, and speciation. Despite its conceptual simplicity, the spatial implementation of neutral models is often computationally non–trivial and difficult to explore interactively. In this paper I present neutRal, an R package designed to simulate spatially explicit neutral community dynamics on a two–dimensional lattice. The package implements a small set of transparent stochastic rules governing local dispersal, global dispersal, and speciation, allowing users to generate and visualize emergent spatial patterns and biodiversity gradients. neutRal provides a modular workflow consisting of three core functions: simulation of neutral dynamics, visualization of final spatial configurations, and calculation of biodiversity metrics including species richness and Shannon diversity. Through a series of simulation experiments, I illustrate how neutRal can be used to check the influence of the key model parameters on the achieved spatial patterns. By combining simplicity, reproducibility, and spatial explicitness, neutRal offers an accessible platform for exploratory research, neutral model construction, and teaching in computational ecology.