The wealth of species: Ecological communities, complex systems and the legacy of Frank Preston

Ecology Letters

Volumn 10, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 188-196

  Nekola, Jeffrey C ^a   Brown, James H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO   (United States)

Author keywords

Community ecology; Competitive sorting; Complexity science; Distance decay; Ecological theory; Neutral models; Species abundance distribution; Species area relationship; Species time relationship; Statistical mechanics

Indexed keywords

ABUNDANCE; COMMUNITY ECOLOGY; ECOLOGICAL THEORY; NUMERICAL MODEL; SPECIES-AREA RELATIONSHIP; STATISTICAL CONCEPT;

ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS; GAS; HISTORY; KINETICS; PHYSICS; REVIEW; THEORETICAL MODEL;

ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS; GASES; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; KINETICS; MODELS, THEORETICAL; PHYSICS;

EID: 33847068298     PISSN: 1461023X     EISSN: 14610248     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2006.01003.x     Document Type: Review

References (65)

1. Allen, C.R. & Holling, C.S. (2002). Cross-scale structure and scale breaks in ecosystems and other complex systems. Ecosystems, 5, 315-318.
2. Bak, P., Tang, C. & Wiesenfeld, K. (1987). Self-organized criticality: an explanation of 1/f noise. Phys. Rev. Lett., 59, 381-384.
3. Bell, G. (2000). The distribution of abundance in neutral communities. Am. Nat., 155, 606-617.
4. Bossenbroek, J.M., Kraft, C.E. & Nekola, J.C. (2001). Prediction of long-distance dispersal using gravity models: Zebra Mussel invasion of inland lakes. Ecol. Appl., 11, 1178-1788.
5. Brown, J.H. (1994a). Organisms and species as complex adaptive systems: linking the biology of populations with the physics of ecosystems. In: Linking Species and Ecosystems (eds Jones, C.G. & Lawton, J.H.). Chapman and Hall, London, pp. 16-24.
6. Brown, J.H. (1994b). Complex ecological systems. In: Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality (eds Cowan, G.A., Pines, D. & Melzer, D.). Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Science of Complexity, Proceedings Volume XVIII. Addison-Wesley, Reading, pp. 419-449.
7. Brown, J.H., West, G.B. & Enquist, B.J. (2000). Scaling in Biology: Patterns and processes, causes and consequences. In: Scaling in Biology (eds Brown, J.H. & West, G.B.). Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 1-24.
8. Brown, J.H., Gupta, V.K., Li, B.L., Milne, B.T., Restrepo, C. & West, G.B. (2002). The fractal nature of nature: power laws, ecological complexity, and biodiversity. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B, Biol. Sci., 357, 619-626.
9. Chave, J. (2004). Neutral theory and community ecology. Ecol. Lett., 7, 241-253.
10. Chave, J., Muller-Landau, H.C. & Levin, S.A. (2002). Comparing classical community models: theoretical consequences for patterns of diversity. Am. Nat., 159, 1-23.
11. Connor, E.F. & McCoy, E.D. (1979). The statistics and biology of the species-area relationship. Am. Nat., 113, 791-833.
12. Etienne, R.S. & Olff, H. (2005). Confronting different models of community structure to species-abundance data: a Bayesian model comparison. Ecol. Lett., 8, 493-504.
13. Gaston, K.J. & Blackburn, T.M. (2000). Pattern and Process in Macroecology. Blackwell Science, Oxford.
14. Gaston, K.J. & Chown, S.L. (2005). Neutrality and the niche. Funct. Ecol., 19, 1-6.
15. Gaston, K.J., Blackburn, T.M. & Lawton, J.H. (1993). Comparing animals and automobiles: a vehicle for understanding body size and abundance relationships in species assemblages? Oikos, 66, 172-178.
16. Halloy, S. R. P. & Whigham, P.A. (2004). The lognormal as universal descriptor of unconstrained complex systems: a unifying theory for complexity. In: Proceedings of the 7th Asia-Pacific Complex Systems Conference. Cairns Convention Centre, Cairns, Qld, Australia, pp. 309-320.
17. Harte, J., Conlisk, E., Ostling, A., Green, J.L., Smith, A.B. (2005). A theory of spatial structure in ecological communities at multiple spatial scales. Ecol. Monogr., 75, 179-197.
18. Hubbell, S.P. (2001). The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Monographs in Population Biology #32. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
19. Limpert, E., Stahel, W.A. & Abbt, M. (2001). Log-normal distributions across the sciences: keys and clues. Bioscience, 51, 341-352.
20. Loehle, C. (1990). Proper statistical treatment of species-area data. Oikos, 57, 143-146.
21. MacArthur, R.H. (1972). Geographical Ecology. Harper and Row, New York, NY.
22. MacArthur, R.H. & Wilson, E.O. (1967). Theory of island biogeography. Monographs in Population Biology #1. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
23. Mandelbrot, B.B. (1982). The Fractal Geometry of Nature. W.H. Freeman & Co., New York, NY.
24. May, R.M. (1975). Patterns of species abundance and diversity. In: Ecology and Evolution of Communities (eds Cody, M.L. & Diamond, J.). Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 81-120.
25. May, R.M. (1976). Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics. Nature, 261, 459-467.
26. May, R.M. (1981). Patterns in multi-species communities. In: Theoretical Ecology (ed. May, R.M.). Blackwell Scientific, Oxford, pp. 197-227.
27. McGill, B.J. (2003a). A test of the unified neutral theory of biodiversity. Nature, 422, 881-885.
28. McGill, B.J. (2003b). Strong and weak tests of macroecological theory. Oikos, 102, 679-685.
29. Meijer, P.H.E., Mountain, R.D. & Soulen, R.J. Jr (1981). Sixth International Conference on Noise in Physical Systems. National Bureau of Standards Special Publication #614, Washington, DC.
30. Milne, B.T. (1991). Lessons from applying fractal models to landscape patterns. In: Quantitative Methods in Landscape Ecology (eds Turner, M.G. & Gardner, R.H.). Springer-Verlag, New York, NY, pp. 199-235.
31. Minchin, P.R. (1987). An evaluation of the relative robustness of techniques for ecological ordination. Vegetatio, 69, 89-108.
32. Montroll, E.W. & Shlesinger, M.F. (1982). On 1/f noise and other distributions with long tails. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA, 79, 3380-3383.
33. Mouquet, N. & Loreau, M. (2003). Community patterns in sourcesink metacommunities. Am. Nat., 162, 544-557.
34. Nee, S., Harvey, P.H. & May, R.M. (1991). Lifting the veil on abundance patterns. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B, Biol. Sci., 243, 161-163.
35. Nekola, J.C. (2005). Latitudinal richness, evenness, and shell size gradients in eastern North American land snail communities. Rec. West. Aust. Mus. Suppl., 68, 39-51.
36. Nekola, J.C. & White, P.S. (1999). Distance decay of similarity in biogeography and ecology. J. Biogeogr., 26, 867-878.
37. Newman, M.E.J. (2005). Power laws, Pareto distributions, and Zipf's law. Contemp. Phys., 46, 323-351.
38. O'Neill, R.V., Gardner, R.H. & Turner, M.G. (1992). A hierarchical neutral model for landscape analysis. Landscape Ecol., 7, 55-61.
39. Preston, F.W. (1948). The commonness, and rarity, of species. Ecology, 29, 254-283.
40. Preston, F.W. (1950). Gas laws and wealth laws. Sci. Mon., 71, 309-311.
41. Preston, F.W. (1962a). The canonical distribution of commonness and rarity - I. Ecology, 43, 185-215.
42. Preston, F.W. (1962b). The canonical distribution of commonness and rarity - II. Ecology, 43, 410-432.
43. Preston, F.W. (1980). Noncanonical distributions of commonness and rarity. Ecology, 6, 88-97.
44. Preston, F.W. (1981). Pseudo-lognormal distributions. Ecology, 62, 355-364.
45. Ritchie, M.E. & Olff, H. (1999). Spatial scaling laws yield a synthetic theory of biodiversity. Nature, 400, 557-560.
46. Root, R.B. (1989). Resolution of respect Frank W. Preston 1896-1989. Bull. Ecol. Soc. Am. 70, 244-247.
47. Rosenzweig, M.L. (1995). Species Diversity in Space and Time. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
48. Roughgarden, J., Gaines, S.D. & Pacala, S.W. (1987). Supply-side ecology: the role of physical transport processes. Symp. Br. Ecol. Soc., 27, 491-518.
49. Shockley, W. (1957). On the statistics of individual variations of productivity in research laboratories. Proc. Inst. Radio Eng., 45, 279-290.
50. Sizling, A.L. & Storch, D. (2004). Power-law species-area relationships and self-similar species distributions within finite areas. Ecol. Lett., 7, 60-68.
51. Sizling, A.L. & Storch, D. (in press). Geometry of species distributions: random clustering and scale invariance. In: Scaling Biodiversity (eds Storch, D., Marquet, P.A. & Brown, J.H.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
52. Skellam, J.G. (1951). Random dispersal in theoretical populations. Biometrika, 38, 196-218.
53. Smith, J.M. (1982). Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
54. Smith, J. (1990). The Frugal Gourmet on our Immigrant Ancestors. Harper-Collins, New York, NY.
55. Solé, R.V. & Bascompte, J. (2006). Self-organization in complex ecosystems. Monographs in Population Biology #42. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
56. Tilman, D. (2004). Niche tradeoffs, neutrality, and community structure: a stochastic theory of resource competition, invasion, and community assembly. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA, 101, 10854-10861.
57. Ugland, K.I., Gray, J.S. & Lambshead, J.D. (2005). Species accumulation curves analysed by a class of null models discovered by Arrhenius. Oikos, 108, 263-274.
58. Volkov, I., Banavar, J.R., Hubbell, S.P. & Maritan, A. (2003). Neutral theory and relative species abundance in ecology. Nature, 424, 1035-1037.
59. Weiner, J. & Solbrig, O.T. (1984). The meaning and measurement of size hierarchies in plant populations. Oecologia, 61, 334-336.
60. West, B.J. (2006a). Thoughts on modeling complexity. Complexity, 11, 33-43.
61. West, B.J. (2006b). Complexity, scaling and fractals in biological signals. In: Wiley Encyclopedia of Biomedical Engineering (ed. Akay M.). Wiley-Interscience, New York, NY.
62. West, B.J. & Latka, M. (2005). Fractional Langevin model of gait variability. J. Neuroeng. Rehabil., 2, 24.
63. West, B.J. & Shlesinger, M.F. (1989). On the ubiquity of 1/f noise. Int. J. Mod. Phys. B, 3, 795-819.
64. White, E.P., Adler, P.B., Lauenroth, W.K., Gill, R.A., Greenberg, D., Kaufman, D.M. et al. (2006). A comparison of the species-time relationship across ecosystems and taxonomic groups. Oikos, 112, 185-195.
65. Williams, C.B. (1964). Patterns in the Balance of Nature and Related Problems in Quantitative Biology. Academic Press, London.