Comment on “From Plant Traits to Plant Communities: A Statistical Mechanistic Approach to Biodiversity”
نویسندگان
چکیده
Shipley et al. (Reports, 3 November 2006, p. 812) predicted plant community composition and relative abundances with a high level of accuracy by maximizing Shannon’s index of information entropy (species diversity), subject to constraints on plant trait averages. We show that the entropy maximization assumption is relatively unimportant and that the high accuracy is due largely to a statistical effect.
منابع مشابه
Comment on “From Plant Traits to Plant Communities: A Statistical Mechanistic Approach to Biodiversity”
Shipley et al. (Reports, 3 November 2006, p. 812) developed a quantitative method for predicting the relative abundance of species from measured traits. We show that the method can have high explanatory power even when all trait and abundance data are randomly and independently generated, because of a mathematical dependence between the observations and predictions. We also suggest a potential ...
متن کاملFrom plant traits to plant communities: a statistical mechanistic approach to biodiversity.
We developed a quantitative method, analogous to those used in statistical mechanics, to predict how biodiversity will vary across environments, which plant species from a species pool will be found in which relative abundances in a given environment, and which plant traits determine community assembly. This provides a scaling from plant traits to ecological communities while bypassing the comp...
متن کاملEthnobotany and biodiversity conservation-holistic approaches from Eastern Africa and Latin America
Scientists widely agree that species extinction has heavily accelerated in the last decades. A grave problem for the conservation of diversity is the still very fragmentary knowledge of the ecology of most species. Attempts of sustainable management and conservation must integrate local communities and their traditional knowledge. Management decisions need to include the high importance of natu...
متن کاملEthnobotany and biodiversity conservation-holistic approaches from Eastern Africa and Latin America
Scientists widely agree that species extinction has heavily accelerated in the last decades. A grave problem for the conservation of diversity is the still very fragmentary knowledge of the ecology of most species. Attempts of sustainable management and conservation must integrate local communities and their traditional knowledge. Management decisions need to include the high importance of natu...
متن کاملUsing a Multi-Trait Approach to Manipulate Plant Functional Diversity in a Biodiversity-Ecosystem Function Experiment
A frequent pattern emerging from biodiversity-ecosystem function studies is that functional group richness enhances ecosystem functions such as primary productivity. However, the manipulation of functional group richness goes along with major disadvantages like the transformation of functional trait data into categories or the exclusion of functional differences between organisms in the same gr...
متن کامل