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A general pattern of the species abundance distribution
Since the 1970s, species abundance distributions (SADs) have been one of the most fundamental issues in ecology and have frequently been investigated and reviewed. However, there was surprisingly little consensus. This study focuses on three essential questions. (1) Is there a general pattern of SAD...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
PeerJ Inc.
2018
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6238767/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30479898 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5928 |
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author | Su, Qiang |
author_facet | Su, Qiang |
author_sort | Su, Qiang |
collection | PubMed |
description | Since the 1970s, species abundance distributions (SADs) have been one of the most fundamental issues in ecology and have frequently been investigated and reviewed. However, there was surprisingly little consensus. This study focuses on three essential questions. (1) Is there a general pattern of SAD that no community can violate it? (2) If it exists, what does it look like? (3) Why is it like this? The frequency distributions of 19,833 SADs from eight datasets (including eleven taxonomic groups from terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems) suggest that a general pattern of SAD might exist. According to two hypotheses (the finiteness of the total energy and the causality from the entropy to the diversity), this study assumes that the general pattern of SAD is approximately consistent with Zipf’s law, which means that Zipf’s law might be more easily to observe when one investigates any SAD. In the future, this conjecture not only needs to be tested (or supported) by more and more datasets, but also depends on how well it is explained from different angles of theories. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6238767 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | PeerJ Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-62387672018-11-26 A general pattern of the species abundance distribution Su, Qiang PeerJ Biodiversity Since the 1970s, species abundance distributions (SADs) have been one of the most fundamental issues in ecology and have frequently been investigated and reviewed. However, there was surprisingly little consensus. This study focuses on three essential questions. (1) Is there a general pattern of SAD that no community can violate it? (2) If it exists, what does it look like? (3) Why is it like this? The frequency distributions of 19,833 SADs from eight datasets (including eleven taxonomic groups from terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems) suggest that a general pattern of SAD might exist. According to two hypotheses (the finiteness of the total energy and the causality from the entropy to the diversity), this study assumes that the general pattern of SAD is approximately consistent with Zipf’s law, which means that Zipf’s law might be more easily to observe when one investigates any SAD. In the future, this conjecture not only needs to be tested (or supported) by more and more datasets, but also depends on how well it is explained from different angles of theories. PeerJ Inc. 2018-11-13 /pmc/articles/PMC6238767/ /pubmed/30479898 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5928 Text en ©2018 Su http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. |
spellingShingle | Biodiversity Su, Qiang A general pattern of the species abundance distribution |
title | A general pattern of the species abundance distribution |
title_full | A general pattern of the species abundance distribution |
title_fullStr | A general pattern of the species abundance distribution |
title_full_unstemmed | A general pattern of the species abundance distribution |
title_short | A general pattern of the species abundance distribution |
title_sort | general pattern of the species abundance distribution |
topic | Biodiversity |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6238767/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30479898 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5928 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT suqiang ageneralpatternofthespeciesabundancedistribution AT suqiang generalpatternofthespeciesabundancedistribution |