Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
J Anim Ecol. 2018 Sep;87(5):1221-1226. doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.12854. Epub 2018 Jul 3.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Monte B. Lloyd's "Mean Crowding" (1967) paper, in which he introduced a metric that accounts for an individual's experience of conspecific density. Mean crowding allows ecologists to measure the degree of spatial aggregation of individuals in a manner relevant to intraspecific competition for resources. We take the concept of mean crowding a step beyond its most common usage and that it has a mathematical relationship to many of the most important concepts in ecology and evolutionary biology. Mean crowding, a first-order approximation of the degree of nonrandomness in a distribution, can function as a powerful heuristic that can unify concepts across disciplines in a more general way that Lloyd originally envisioned.
今年是蒙特 B. 劳埃德（Monte B. Lloyd）的“平均拥挤度”（1967 年）论文发表 50 周年，他在该文中引入了一个可以衡量同种个体密度对个体影响的指标。平均拥挤度使得生态学家能够以与同种个体对资源竞争相关的方式，测量个体在空间上的聚集程度。我们将平均拥挤度的概念进一步拓展，发现它与生态学和进化生物学中许多最重要的概念都存在数学关系。平均拥挤度是对分布中非随机性程度的一阶近似，可以作为一种强大的启发式方法，以劳埃德最初设想的更通用的方式，将不同学科的概念统一起来。
