A Strong Test of the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology

Xiao, Xiao; McGlinn, Daniel J.; White, Ethan

doi:10.1086/679576

Cited by 61 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 66 publications

(68 reference statements)

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“…In spite of this, the IED remains a largely 344 successful metric because it is free of this particular problem. These results are consistent with 345 an independent study of tree communities (Xiao et al 2013), suggesting that the observed 346 relationships between the theoretical predictions and empirical data may be general, at least 347 within plants. it appears that the SED is exponential in form, the exponent itself (  2 n ) is a likely cause of the 365 highly regular pattern in mismatch between theory and data.…”

Section: Discussion 281supporting

confidence: 77%

Empirical tests of within‐ and across‐species energetics in a diverse plant community

Newman

Harte

Lowell

et al. 2014

Ecology

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19Many fundamental properties of ecological systems and interactions are tied to body size, and a 20 related metric, the metabolic rate distribution, both within and across species. A previously 21proposed Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology (METE) predicts numerous interrelated 22 macroecological patterns, including spatial distributions of individuals within species, abundance 23 distributions across species, species area relationships, and distributions of metabolic rates of all 24 individuals within a community. Extensive tests of METE's macroecological predictions 25 generally support the theory, but two related predictions have not been evaluated against full 26 community census data: the distribution of metabolic rates of individuals within species as a 27 function of the abundance of the species, and the distribution of average individual metabolic 28 rates across species. We test the metabolic predictions of METE for herbaceous plants in a 29 subalpine meadow and show that while this theory realistically predicts the distribution of 30 individual metabolic rates across the entire community, the within and across species predictions 31 generally fail. We also test the energy-equivalence type prediction that arises as a consequence 32 of the prediction for the distribution of average individual metabolic rates across species. We 33 suggest several possible explanations for the empirical deviations from theory, and distinguish 34 between the expected deviations caused by ecological disturbance and those deviations that 35 might be corrected within the theory. 36 37 Key words 38 metabolism, macroecology, scaling laws, Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology, METE, 39 information entropy, energy equivalence 40 41 Erica A. Newman et al., 3 Introduction 42

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Section: Discussion 281supporting

confidence: 77%

Empirical tests of within‐ and across‐species energetics in a diverse plant community

Newman

Harte

Lowell

et al. 2014

Ecology

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“…Regardless of the underlying reason that the models performed similarly, our results indicate that the SAD usually does not contain sufficient information to distinguish among the possible statistical processes—let alone biological processes—with any degree of certainty (Volkov et al, 2005), though it is possible that this result differs in marine systems (see Connolly et al, 2014). A more promising way to draw inferences about ecological processes is to evaluate each model’s ability to simultaneously explain multiple macroecological patterns, rather than relying on a single pattern like the SAD (McGill, 2003; McGill, Maurer & Weiser, 2006; Newman et al, 2014; Xiao, McGlinn & White, 2015). It has also been suggested that examining second-order effects, such as the scale-dependence of macroecological patterns (Blonder et al, 2014) or how the parameters of the distribution change across gradients (Mac Nally et al, 2014), can provide better inference about process from these kinds of pattern.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An extensive comparison of species-abundance distribution models

Baldridge

Harris

Xiao

et al. 2016

PeerJ

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A number of different models have been proposed as descriptions of the species-abundance distribution (SAD). Most evaluations of these models use only one or two models, focus on only a single ecosystem or taxonomic group, or fail to use appropriate statistical methods. We use likelihood and AIC to compare the fit of four of the most widely used models to data on over 16,000 communities from a diverse array of taxonomic groups and ecosystems. Across all datasets combined the log-series, Poisson lognormal, and negative binomial all yield similar overall fits to the data. Therefore, when correcting for differences in the number of parameters the log-series generally provides the best fit to data. Within individual datasets some other distributions performed nearly as well as the log-series even after correcting for the number of parameters. The Zipf distribution is generally a poor characterization of the SAD.

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“…; Xiao et al . ). Our model successfully captures several aspects of coral reef metacommunity structure, even though it, like unified theories, predicts a broad range of ecological patterns with few free parameters (two for the regional species‐abundance distribution, and two power‐law scaling parameters for aggregation).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…; Xiao et al . ). In addition, when tested against individual patterns, alternative models often make very similar predictions (for instance, truncated lognormal abundance distributions strongly resemble log‐series distributions); in such cases, the model with fewer parameters may well be favoured even if more comprehensive sampling, or testing against multiple patterns, would yield a different result.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

A unified model explains commonness and rarity on coral reefs

2017

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Abundance patterns in ecological communities have important implications for biodiversity maintenance and ecosystem functioning. However, ecological theory has been largely unsuccessful at capturing multiple macroecological abundance patterns simultaneously. Here, we propose a parsimonious model that unifies widespread ecological relationships involving local aggregation, species-abundance distributions, and species associations, and we test this model against the metacommunity structure of reef-building corals and coral reef fishes across the western and central Pacific. For both corals and fishes, the unified model simultaneously captures extremely well local species-abundance distributions, interspecific variation in the strength of spatial aggregation, patterns of community similarity, species accumulation, and regional species richness, performing far better than alternative models also examined here and in previous work on coral reefs. Our approach contributes to the development of synthetic theory for large-scale patterns of community structure in nature, and to addressing ongoing challenges in biodiversity conservation at macroecological scales.

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A Strong Test of the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology

Cited by 61 publications

References 66 publications

Empirical tests of within‐ and across‐species energetics in a diverse plant community

Empirical tests of within‐ and across‐species energetics in a diverse plant community

An extensive comparison of species-abundance distribution models

A unified model explains commonness and rarity on coral reefs

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