Laboratory of Ecohydrology, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Laboratory of Ecohydrology, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland;
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Oct 3;114(40):10672-10677. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1708376114. Epub 2017 Aug 22.
Scaling laws in ecology, intended both as functional relationships among ecologically relevant quantities and the probability distributions that characterize their occurrence, have long attracted the interest of empiricists and theoreticians. Empirical evidence exists of power laws associated with the number of species inhabiting an ecosystem, their abundances, and traits. Although their functional form appears to be ubiquitous, empirical scaling exponents vary with ecosystem type and resource supply rate. The idea that ecological scaling laws are linked has been entertained before, but the full extent of macroecological pattern covariations, the role of the constraints imposed by finite resource supply, and a comprehensive empirical verification are still unexplored. Here, we propose a theoretical scaling framework that predicts the linkages of several macroecological patterns related to species' abundances and body sizes. We show that such a framework is consistent with the stationary-state statistics of a broad class of resource-limited community dynamics models, regardless of parameterization and model assumptions. We verify predicted theoretical covariations by contrasting empirical data and provide testable hypotheses for yet unexplored patterns. We thus place the observed variability of ecological scaling exponents into a coherent statistical framework where patterns in ecology embed constrained fluctuations.
生态学中的标度律，既是生态相关量之间的函数关系，也是描述它们发生概率分布的规律，长期以来一直吸引着经验主义者和理论家的兴趣。实证证据表明，与栖息在生态系统中的物种数量、它们的丰度和特征相关的幂律是存在的。尽管它们的函数形式似乎无处不在，但经验标度指数因生态系统类型和资源供应率而异。人们之前就已经认识到生态标度律之间存在联系，但宏观生态模式的变化程度、有限资源供应所施加的约束的作用以及全面的经验验证仍然没有得到探索。在这里，我们提出了一个理论标度框架，预测了与物种丰度和体型相关的几个宏观生态模式之间的联系。我们表明，无论参数化和模型假设如何，这样的框架都与广泛的资源限制群落动力学模型的稳态统计数据一致。我们通过对比实证数据来验证预测的理论变化，并为尚未探索的模式提供可测试的假设。因此，我们将观察到的生态标度指数的可变性置于一个连贯的统计框架中，在这个框架中，生态学中的模式嵌入了受约束的波动。
