Insect species diversity, abundance and body size relationships

Siemann, Evan; Tilman, David; Haarstad, John

doi:10.1038/380704a0

Cited by 197 publications

(210 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…However, the fact that the slopes for chordates and arthropods are smaller than one and are very similar still awaits to be elucidated. Because body size is a major factor affecting growth, reproduction, space use, and abundance of organisms (Damuth, 1981;Brose et al, 2006a), understanding how phylogeny interacts with this key feature is a necessary step toward a global theory of community structure (Siemann et al, 1996). We note that other trend reversals in taxonomic sub-units have already been documented.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The signature of phylogenetic constraints on food-web structure

Bersier

Kehrli

2008

Ecological Complexity

113

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The signature of phylogenetic constraints on food-web structure

Bersier

Kehrli

2008

Ecological Complexity

113

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“…A confusing factor is that the phylogenetic pattern (e.g., of all mammals or birds) is often reported (Blackburn and Gaston 1998;Gittleman and Purvis 1998;Gardezi and da Silva 1999;Owens et al 1999;Orme et al 2002), whereas we focus here on the pattern in a local community because we are interested in the ecological processes underlying it. Most of the studies report a unimodal, rightskewed shape for the species-body size distribution in a community (Dial and Marzluff 1988;Blackburn and Gaston 1994;Brown 1995;Dixon et al 1995;Siemann et al 1996Siemann et al , 1999Gregory 1998;Osler and Beattie 1999;Bakker and Kelt 2000;Gaston and Blackburn 2000;Gomez and Espadaler 2000). Nevertheless, the optimum at intermediate body size is not always very pronounced, there is much variation in skewness, and bimodal shapes are also observed (Chown and Gaston 1997;Bakker and Kelt 2000;Gaston and Blackburn 2000;Gaston et al 2001).…”

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confidence: 99%

How Dispersal Limitation Shapes Species–Body Size Distributions in Local Communities

Etienne

Olff

2004

The American Naturalist

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A critical but poorly understood pattern in macroecology is the often unimodal species-body size distribution (also known as body size-diversity relationship) in a local community (embedded in a much larger regional species pool). Purely neutral community models that assume functional equivalence among species are incapable of explaining this pattern because body size is the key determinant of functional differences between species. Several nichebased explanations have been offered, but none of them is completely satisfactory. Here we develop a simple model that unites a neutral community model with niche-based theory to explain the relationship. In the model, species of similar size are assumed to belong to the same size guild. Within a size guild, all individuals are equivalent in their competition for resources, sensu Hubbell's neutral community model; they have the same speciation rate and dispersal capacities. Between size guilds, however, the total number of individuals, the speciation rate, and the dispersal capacities differ, but using known allometric scaling laws for these properties, we can describe the differences between size guilds. Our model predicts that species richness reaches an optimum at an intermediate body size, in agreement with observations. The optimum at intermediate body size is basically the result of a trade-off between, on the one hand, allometric scaling laws for the number of individuals and the speciation rate that decrease with body size and, on the other hand, the scaling law for active dispersal that increases with body size.

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“…Although N imposes an obvious constraint on the number of species (i.e., S ≤ N), empirical and theoretical studies suggest that S scales with N at a rate of 0.25-0.5 (i.e., S ∼ N z and 0.25 ≤ z ≤ 0.5) (20)(21)(22). Importantly, this relationship applies to samples from different systems and does not pertain to cumulative patterns (e.g., collector's curves), which are based on resampling (20)(21)(22). Recent studies have also shown that N constrains universal patterns of commonness and rarity by imposing a numerical constraint on how abundance varies among species, across space, and through time (23,24).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity

Locey

Lennon

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

870

380

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Scaling laws underpin unifying theories of biodiversity and are among the most predictively powerful relationships in biology. However, scaling laws developed for plants and animals often go untested or fail to hold for microorganisms. As a result, it is unclear whether scaling laws of biodiversity will span evolutionarily distant domains of life that encompass all modes of metabolism and scales of abundance. Using a global-scale compilation of ∼35,000 sites and ∼5.6·10 6 species, including the largest ever inventory of high-throughput molecular data and one of the largest compilations of plant and animal community data, we show similar rates of scaling in commonness and rarity across microorganisms and macroscopic plants and animals. We document a universal dominance scaling law that holds across 30 orders of magnitude, an unprecedented expanse that predicts the abundance of dominant ocean bacteria. In combining this scaling law with the lognormal model of biodiversity, we predict that Earth is home to upward of 1 trillion (10 12 ) microbial species. Microbial biodiversity seems greater than ever anticipated yet predictable from the smallest to the largest microbiome.biodiversity | microbiology | macroecology | microbiome | rare biosphere T he understanding of microbial biodiversity has rapidly transformed over the past decade. High-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics have expanded the catalog of microbial taxa by orders of magnitude, whereas the unearthing of new phyla is reshaping the tree of life (1-3). At the same time, discoveries of novel forms of metabolism have provided insight into how microbes persist in virtually all aquatic, terrestrial, engineered, and host-associated ecosystems (4, 5). However, this period of discovery has uncovered few, if any, general rules for predicting microbial biodiversity at scales of abundance that characterize, for example, the ∼10 14 cells of bacteria that inhabit a single human or the ∼10 30 cells of bacteria and archaea estimated to inhabit Earth (6, 7). Such findings would aid the estimation of global species richness and reveal whether theories of biodiversity hold across all scales of abundance and whether socalled law-like patterns of biodiversity span the tree of life.A primary goal of ecology and biodiversity theory is to predict diversity, commonness, and rarity across evolutionarily distant taxa and scales of space, time, and abundance (8-10). This goal can hardly be achieved without accounting for the most abundant, widespread, and metabolically, taxonomically, and functionally diverse organisms on Earth (i.e., microorganisms). However, tests of biodiversity theory rarely include both microbial and macrobial datasets. At the same time, the study of microbial ecology has yet to uncover quantitative relationships that predict diversity, commonness, and rarity at the scale of host microbiomes and beyond. These unexplored opportunities leave the understanding of biodiversity limited to the most conspicuous species of plants and animals. This lack of synthesi...

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Insect species diversity, abundance and body size relationships

Cited by 197 publications

References 24 publications

The signature of phylogenetic constraints on food-web structure

The signature of phylogenetic constraints on food-web structure

How Dispersal Limitation Shapes Species–Body Size Distributions in Local Communities

Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity

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