Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Playing with loaded dice
- 2 Population-based models of community assembly
- 3 Trait-based community ecology
- 4 Modeling trait-based environmental filters: Bayesian statistics, information theory and the Maximum Entropy Formalism
- 5 Community dynamics, natural selection and the origin of community-aggregated traits
- 6 Community assembly during a Mediterranean succession
- 7 The statistical mechanics of species abundance distributions
- 8 Epilogue: traits are not enough
- References
- Index
7 - The statistical mechanics of species abundance distributions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Playing with loaded dice
- 2 Population-based models of community assembly
- 3 Trait-based community ecology
- 4 Modeling trait-based environmental filters: Bayesian statistics, information theory and the Maximum Entropy Formalism
- 5 Community dynamics, natural selection and the origin of community-aggregated traits
- 6 Community assembly during a Mediterranean succession
- 7 The statistical mechanics of species abundance distributions
- 8 Epilogue: traits are not enough
- References
- Index
Summary
So far in this book we have been looking for an answer to the following general question: If we know which species exist in the species pool, and we know their functional traits, can we predict the relative abundance of each species in different environmental contexts? What happens if we don't know which species – or even how many species – are in the species pool? Clearly, if we don't know which species are in the pool then we are in no position to predict their relative abundances. Even if we do know that a particular species is in the pool we still can't predict its relative abundance if we don't know how many other species are in the pool; after all, relative abundance is a proportion from a total. Therefore, if we don't know the composition of the species pool then we can't possibly answer the central question posed in this book.
However, even when missing this vital information about the composition of the species pool, we can ask a different, but related, question. Since we can't inquire about the abundance of species i, we might want to know how many species will have a given abundance. We can ask, for example: how many species will have only one individual or unit of biomass? How many species will be a little less rare and have two individuals, or units of biomass, and so on?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Plant Traits to Vegetation StructureChance and Selection in the Assembly of Ecological Communities, pp. 213 - 254Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009