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8 - Body size and scale invariance: multifractals in invertebrate communities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2009

By
Peter E. Schmid  and
Jenny M. Schmid-Araya
Edited by
Alan G. Hildrew ,
David G. Raffaelli  and
Ronni Edmonds-Brown
Peter E. Schmid
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London; University of Vienna
Jenny M. Schmid-Araya
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
Alan G. Hildrew
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
David G. Raffaelli
Affiliation:
University of York
Ronni Edmonds-Brown
Affiliation:
University of Hertfordshire
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Summary

Introduction

As ecologists seek conceptual syntheses to understand the mechanistic and functional processes that underlie empirical community patterns in different ecosystems, they are developing concepts that depict complexity on a number of universal themes. General patterns in the statistical distributions of species and individuals within and across ecosystems provide information about the organizing principles underlying ecosystem structure. Interrelations between species richness, population density, body-size and distribution ranges are of central concern in ecology and have been widely debated (Brown, 1995; Brown, Allen & Gillooly, this volume). To represent the structure of ecosystems adequately, species composition and population size are the most appropriate attributes containing information that is closely correlated with the organism's size.

Attributes of body size may affect many ecological characteristics, such as resource use and allocation in communities, reflecting their complex internal structure. Feeding patterns that result in resource partitioning among species of a benthic species assemblage demonstrate strong body-size dependence (Schmid & Schmid-Araya, 1997; Woodward & Warren, this volume). Information on species population and body-size distribution (BSD) of communities is frequently given for the larger or is toxonomically not well resolved, organisms inhabiting an ecosystem, therefore resulting in veiled, often highly scattered and incomplete, distributions. In contrast, the size distribution of well-resolved species communities may reflect the different evolutionary traits underlying diverse scaling domains. Therefore, more realistic expectations for real-world species and abundance distributions are obtained using scale-dependent definitions of individual species' spatial and/or size structure within communities.

Type
Chapter
Information
Body Size: The Structure and Function of Aquatic Ecosystems , pp. 140 - 166
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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