Ponente
Descripción
A major focus of ecology is the study of species diversity across ecosystems and its relationship to ecosystem productivity. Considerable effort has been directed at the challenge of finding other macro- level ecosystem variables that might correlate with, or potentially explain, the wide range of values of species richness observed in different ecosystems and taxa across spatial scales. By combining results from the two ecological theories: the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology and the Metabolic Theory of Ecology, we are able to derive such a relationship. An ecological “equation of state” describes the general relationship among species richness, energy flow, biomass, and abundance. It accurately captures the relationship among these state variables in 42 data sets, including vegetation and arthropod communities, that span a wide variety of spatial scales and habitats. The success of this equation opens up opportunities for estimating difficult-to measure state variables from measurements of others, adds support for two current theories, and is a step toward unification in ecology.
