Publication Date:
2005-08-27
Description:
Distributions of numerical abundance and resource use among species are fundamental aspects of community structure. Here we characterize these patterns for tropical reef fishes and corals across a 10,000-kilometer biodiversity gradient. Numerical abundance and resource-use distributions have similar shapes, but they emerge at markedly different scales. These results are consistent with a controversial null hypothesis regarding community structure, according to which abundance distributions arise from the interplay of multiple stochastic environmental and demographic factors. Our findings underscore the importance of robust conservation strategies that are appropriately scaled to the broad suite of environmental processes that help sustain biodiversity.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Connolly, Sean R -- Hughes, Terry P -- Bellwood, David R -- Karlson, Ronald H -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2005 Aug 26;309(5739):1363-5.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Centre for Coral Reef Biodiversity, Department of Marine Biology, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD 4811, Australia.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16123298" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
*Anthozoa
;
Biodiversity
;
Biomass
;
*Ecosystem
;
Environment
;
Mathematics
;
Models, Biological
;
Normal Distribution
;
Pacific Ocean
;
*Perciformes
;
Population Density
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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