On the origin and robustness of power-law species-area relationships in ecology.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Garcia Martin H
PROVIDER: S-EPMC1502454 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Jul
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
On the origin and robustness of power-law species-area relationships in ecology.
García Martín Héctor H Goldenfeld Nigel N
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20060626 27
We present an explanation for the widely reported power-law species-area relationship (SAR), which relates the area occupied by a biome to the number of species that it supports. We argue that power-law SARs are a robust consequence of a skewed species abundance distribution resembling a lognormal with higher rarity, together with the observation that individuals of a given species tend to cluster. We show that the precise form of the SAR transcends the specific details of organism interactions, ...[more]
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