Journal
OECOLOGIA
Volume 170, Issue 2, Pages 289-295Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00442-012-2313-0
Keywords
Biodiversity; Metabolic theory of ecology; Copepods; Temperature; Development
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Funding
- Division Of Ocean Sciences
- Directorate For Geosciences [0962074] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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A major goal of modern ecology is to understand macroecological patterns based on their mechanistic underpinnings. The metabolic theory of ecology predicts a monotonic increase of biodiversity with temperature based on the principles of metabolism. For marine copepods, observations have shown that while biodiversity does increase with temperature, the theory's prediction overestimates the slope of this relationship by a factor of two. By relaxing the theory's assumption that size is invariant with respect to temperature, and by incorporating a mechanistic description of copepod development into the theory, we provide an adjusted prediction that agrees with the observed relationship. The addition of development into the theory adds the potential to refine the prediction for a wider range of taxa, to account for discrepancies between prediction and observations, and to describe a wider variety of temperature-richness relationships.
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