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Roots of Diversity Relations
The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology; however, its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to result from ubiquitous imperatives in energy transduction....
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
2008
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2814133/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20130809 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2008/654672 |
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author | Würtz, Peter Annila, Arto |
author_facet | Würtz, Peter Annila, Arto |
author_sort | Würtz, Peter |
collection | PubMed |
description | The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology; however, its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to result from ubiquitous imperatives in energy transduction. From a thermodynamic point of view, organisms are transduction mechanisms that distribute an influx of energy down along the steepest gradients to the ecosystem's diverse repositories of chemical energy, that is, populations of species. Transduction machineries, that is, ecosystems assembled from numerous species, may emerge and evolve toward high efficiency on large areas that hold more matter than small ones. This results in the well-known logistic-like relationship between the area and the number of species. The species-area relationship is understood, in terms of thermodynamics, to be the skewed cumulative curve of chemical energy distribution that is commonly known as the species-abundance relationship. |
format | Text |
id | pubmed-2814133 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2008 |
publisher | Hindawi Publishing Corporation |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-28141332010-02-03 Roots of Diversity Relations Würtz, Peter Annila, Arto J Biophys Research Article The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology; however, its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to result from ubiquitous imperatives in energy transduction. From a thermodynamic point of view, organisms are transduction mechanisms that distribute an influx of energy down along the steepest gradients to the ecosystem's diverse repositories of chemical energy, that is, populations of species. Transduction machineries, that is, ecosystems assembled from numerous species, may emerge and evolve toward high efficiency on large areas that hold more matter than small ones. This results in the well-known logistic-like relationship between the area and the number of species. The species-area relationship is understood, in terms of thermodynamics, to be the skewed cumulative curve of chemical energy distribution that is commonly known as the species-abundance relationship. Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2008 2008-12-11 /pmc/articles/PMC2814133/ /pubmed/20130809 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2008/654672 Text en Copyright © 2008 P. Würtz and A. Annila. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Würtz, Peter Annila, Arto Roots of Diversity Relations |
title | Roots of Diversity Relations |
title_full | Roots of Diversity Relations |
title_fullStr | Roots of Diversity Relations |
title_full_unstemmed | Roots of Diversity Relations |
title_short | Roots of Diversity Relations |
title_sort | roots of diversity relations |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2814133/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20130809 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2008/654672 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT wurtzpeter rootsofdiversityrelations AT annilaarto rootsofdiversityrelations |