Würtz Peter, Annila Arto
Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland.
J Biophys. 2008;2008:654672. doi: 10.1155/2008/654672. Epub 2008 Dec 11.
The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology; however, its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to result from ubiquitous imperatives in energy transduction. From a thermodynamic point of view, organisms are transduction mechanisms that distribute an influx of energy down along the steepest gradients to the ecosystem's diverse repositories of chemical energy, that is, populations of species. Transduction machineries, that is, ecosystems assembled from numerous species, may emerge and evolve toward high efficiency on large areas that hold more matter than small ones. This results in the well-known logistic-like relationship between the area and the number of species. The species-area relationship is understood, in terms of thermodynamics, to be the skewed cumulative curve of chemical energy distribution that is commonly known as the species-abundance relationship.
物种 - 面积关系是生态学中的核心普遍规律之一；然而，其起源一直是个谜。由于生态系统被理解为能量转换系统，物种丰富度的规律性被认为是能量转换中普遍存在的必要条件所导致的。从热力学角度来看，生物体是将能量流入沿着最陡梯度向下分配到生态系统中各种化学能储存库（即物种种群）的转换机制。转换机制，即由众多物种组成的生态系统，可能在比小区域容纳更多物质的大面积上出现并朝着高效方向进化。这就导致了面积与物种数量之间众所周知的类似逻辑斯蒂的关系。从热力学角度理解，物种 - 面积关系是化学能分布的偏态累积曲线，通常被称为物种 - 丰度关系。
