Cushman Samuel A
USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Flagstaff, AZ 86001, USA.
Entropy (Basel). 2021 Oct 28;23(11):1425. doi: 10.3390/e23111425.
This paper presents a multivariate textual analysis of more than 1300 papers on entropy in ecology. There are six main insights that emerged. First, there is a large body of literature that has addressed some aspect of entropy in ecology, most of which has been published in the last 5-10 years. Second, the vast majority of these papers focus on species distribution, species richness, relative abundance or trophic structure and not landscape-scale patterns or processes, pe se. Third, there have been few papers addressing landscape-level questions related to entropy. Fourth, the quantitative analysis with hierarchical clustering identified a strongly nested structure among papers that addressed entropy in ecology. Fifth, there is clear differentiation of papers focused on landscape-level applications of entropy from other papers, with landscape focused papers clustered together at each level of the hierarchy in a relatively small and closely associated group. Sixth, this group of landscape-focused papers was substructured between papers that explicitly adopted entropy measures to quantify the spatial pattern of landscape mosaics, often using variations on Boltzmann entropy, versus those that utilize Shannon entropy measures from information theory, which are not generally explicit in their assessment of spatial configuration. This review provides a comprehensive, quantitative assessment of the scope, trends and relationships among a large body of literature related to entropy in ecology and for the first time puts landscape ecological research on entropy into that context.
本文对1300多篇关于生态学中熵的论文进行了多变量文本分析。得出了六个主要观点。第一，有大量文献探讨了生态学中熵的某些方面，其中大部分是在过去5至10年发表的。第二，这些论文绝大多数关注物种分布、物种丰富度、相对丰度或营养结构，而非景观尺度的格局或过程本身。第三，涉及与熵相关的景观层面问题的论文很少。第四，通过层次聚类进行的定量分析确定了探讨生态学中熵的论文之间存在强烈的嵌套结构。第五，关注熵在景观层面应用的论文与其他论文有明显区别，关注景观的论文在层次结构的每个层面上聚集在一起，形成一个相对较小且联系紧密的群体。第六，这组关注景观的论文在结构上又分为两类，一类明确采用熵度量来量化景观镶嵌体的空间格局，通常使用玻尔兹曼熵的变体，另一类则利用信息论中的香农熵度量，后者在评估空间配置时通常不明确。本综述对大量与生态学中熵相关的文献的范围、趋势和关系进行了全面的定量评估，并首次将景观生态学中关于熵的研究置于该背景下。
