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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....

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Würtz, Peter, Annila, Arto
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2008
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.
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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
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