Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Giometto A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3607007 | biostudies-other | 2013 Mar
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
Giometto Andrea A Altermatt Florian F Carrara Francesco F Maritan Amos A Rinaldo Andrea A
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20130304 12
The size of an organism matters for its metabolic, growth, mortality, and other vital rates. Scale-free community size spectra (i.e., size distributions regardless of species) are routinely observed in natural ecosystems and are the product of intra- and interspecies regulation of the relative abundance of organisms of different sizes. Intra- and interspecies distributions of body sizes are thus major determinants of ecosystems' structure and function. We show experimentally that single-species ...[more]