On the Origin and Robustness of Power-law Species-area Relationships in Ecology.
From: Department of Physics and Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Publish Date: Jul 2006
- ISSN: 0027-8424
- Volume: 103
- Issue: 27
- Pages: 10310-5
- Medium: Print
- Language: English
- Citation (JAMA): García Martín Héctor, Goldenfeld Nigel, et al. On the Origin and Robustness of Power-law Species-area Relationships in Ecology.. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. Jul 2006;103:10310-5
Abstract
We present an explanation for the widely reported power-law species-area relationship (SAR), which relates the area occupied by a biome to the number of species that it supports. We argue that power-law SARs are a robust consequence of a skewed species abundance distribution resembling a lognormal with higher rarity, together with the observation that individuals of a given species tend to cluster. We show that the precise form of the SAR transcends the specific details of organism interactions, enabling us to characterize its broad trends across taxa.
Mesh Headings (Keywords): Animals, Behavior, Animal, Ecology, Models, Biological, Species Specificity
Check for Full Text / PubMed Unique Identifier (PMID): 16801556
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