Publication Date:
2015-09-05
Description:
Ecosystems exhibit surprising regularities in structure and function across terrestrial and aquatic biomes worldwide. We assembled a global data set for 2260 communities of large mammals, invertebrates, plants, and plankton. We find that predator and prey biomass follow a general scaling law with exponents consistently near (3/4). This pervasive pattern implies that the structure of the biomass pyramid becomes increasingly bottom-heavy at higher biomass. Similar exponents are obtained for community production-biomass relations, suggesting conserved links between ecosystem structure and function. These exponents are similar to many body mass allometries, and yet ecosystem scaling emerges independently from individual-level scaling, which is not fully understood. These patterns suggest a greater degree of ecosystem-level organization than previously recognized and a more predictive approach to ecological theory.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Hatton, Ian A -- McCann, Kevin S -- Fryxell, John M -- Davies, T Jonathan -- Smerlak, Matteo -- Sinclair, Anthony R E -- Loreau, Michel -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Sep 4;349(6252):aac6284. doi: 10.1126/science.aac6284. Epub 2015 Sep 3.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Biology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1B1, Canada. i.a.hatton@gmail.com. ; Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada. ; Department of Biology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1B1, Canada. ; Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5, Canada. ; Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada. Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute, P.O. Box 661, Arusha, United Republic of Tanzania. ; Centre for Biodiversity Theory and Modeling, Experimental Ecology Station, CNRS, 09200 Moulis, France.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26339034" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
*Biomass
;
*Databases, Factual
;
*Food Chain
;
Invertebrates
;
Mammals
;
Plankton
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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