Journal
AMERICAN NATURALIST
Volume 178, Issue 5, Pages 602-611Publisher
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1086/662176
Keywords
diversity patterns; spatial scaling; beta diversity; maximum entropy; power law; taxon invariance
Categories
Funding
- grant agency of the Czech Republic [P505/11/2387]
- Czech Ministry of Education [MSM0021620845]
- European Union [26852]
- Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic [KJB601110919]
- Agency for Nature Conservation and Landscape Protection
- National Science Foundation [DEB-0640386, DEB-0425651, DEB-0346488, DEB-0129874, DEB-00753102, DEB-9909347, DEB-9615226, DEB-9405933, DEB-9221033, DEB-9100058, DEB-8906869, DEB-8605042, DEB-8206992, DEB-7922197]
- Center for Tropical Forest Science
- Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
- John D. and Catherine T. Mac-Arthur Foundation
- Mellon Foundation
- Celera Foundation
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The species-area relationship (SAR) is considered to be one of a few generalities in ecology, yet a universal model of its shape and slope has remained elusive. Recently, Harte et al. argued that the slope of the SAR for a given area is driven by a single parameter, the ratio between total number of individuals and number of species (i.e., the mean population size across species at a given scale). We provide a geometric interpretation of this dependence. At the same time, however, we show that this dependence cannot be universal across taxa: if it holds for a taxon composed from two subsets of species and also for one of its subsets, it cannot simultaneously hold for the other subset. Using three data sets, we show that the slope of the SAR considerably varies around the prediction. We estimate the limits of this variation by using geometric considerations, providing a theory based on species spatial turnover at different scales. We argue that the SAR cannot be strictly universal, but its slope at each particular scale varies within the constraints given by species' spatial turnover at finer spatial scales, and this variation is biologically informative.
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