Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 6, Issue 11, Pages 990-995Publisher
WILEY-BLACKWELL
DOI: 10.1046/j.1461-0248.2003.00526.x
Keywords
allometry; annual biomass production; cross-taxonomic comparison; energy use; macroecology; metabolism; scaling; trophic energy transfer
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Ecosystem properties result in part from the characteristics of individual organisms. How these individual traits scale to impact ecosystem-level processes is currently unclear. Because metabolism is a fundamental process underlying many individual- and population-level variables, it provides a mechanism for linking individual characteristics with large-scale processes. Here we use metabolism and ecosystem thermodynamics to scale from physiology to individual biomass production and population-level energy use. Temperature-corrected rates of individual-level biomass production show the same body-size dependence across a wide range of aerobic eukaryotes, from unicellular organisms to mammals and vascular plants. Population-level energy use for both, mammals and plants are strongly influenced by both metabolism and thermodynamic constraints on energy exchange between trophic levels. Our results show that because metabolism is a fundamental trait of organisms, it not only provides a link between individual- and ecosystem-level processes, but can also highlight other import-ant factors constraining ecological structure and dynamics.
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