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A Perspective on Body Size and Abundance Relationships across Ecological Communities

Recently, several studies have reported relationships between the abundance of organisms in an ecological community and their mean body size (called cross-community scaling relationships: CCSRs) that can be described by simple power functions. A primary focus of these studies has been on the scaling...

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Autores principales: Gjoni, Vojsava, Glazier, Douglas Stewart
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7150794/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32111083
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biology9030042
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author Gjoni, Vojsava
Glazier, Douglas Stewart
author_facet Gjoni, Vojsava
Glazier, Douglas Stewart
author_sort Gjoni, Vojsava
collection PubMed
description Recently, several studies have reported relationships between the abundance of organisms in an ecological community and their mean body size (called cross-community scaling relationships: CCSRs) that can be described by simple power functions. A primary focus of these studies has been on the scaling exponent (slope) and whether it approximates −3/4, as predicted by Damuth’s rule and the metabolic theory in ecology. However, some CCSR studies have reported scaling exponents significantly different from the theoretical value of −3/4. Why this variation occurs is still largely unknown. The purpose of our commentary is to show the value of examining both the slopes and elevations of CCSRs and how various ecological factors may affect them. As a heuristic exercise, we reanalyzed three published data sets based on phytoplankton, rodent, and macroinvertebrate assemblages that we subdivided according to three distinctly different ecological factors (i.e., climate zone, season, and trophic level). Our analyses reveal significant variation in either or both the CCSR slopes and elevations for marine phytoplankton communities across climate zones, a desert rodent community across seasons, and saltwater lagoon macroinvertebrate communities across trophic levels. We conclude that achieving a comprehensive understanding of abundance-size relationships at the community level will require consideration of both slopes and elevations of these relationships and their possible variation in different ecological contexts.
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spelling pubmed-71507942020-04-20 A Perspective on Body Size and Abundance Relationships across Ecological Communities Gjoni, Vojsava Glazier, Douglas Stewart Biology (Basel) Commentary Recently, several studies have reported relationships between the abundance of organisms in an ecological community and their mean body size (called cross-community scaling relationships: CCSRs) that can be described by simple power functions. A primary focus of these studies has been on the scaling exponent (slope) and whether it approximates −3/4, as predicted by Damuth’s rule and the metabolic theory in ecology. However, some CCSR studies have reported scaling exponents significantly different from the theoretical value of −3/4. Why this variation occurs is still largely unknown. The purpose of our commentary is to show the value of examining both the slopes and elevations of CCSRs and how various ecological factors may affect them. As a heuristic exercise, we reanalyzed three published data sets based on phytoplankton, rodent, and macroinvertebrate assemblages that we subdivided according to three distinctly different ecological factors (i.e., climate zone, season, and trophic level). Our analyses reveal significant variation in either or both the CCSR slopes and elevations for marine phytoplankton communities across climate zones, a desert rodent community across seasons, and saltwater lagoon macroinvertebrate communities across trophic levels. We conclude that achieving a comprehensive understanding of abundance-size relationships at the community level will require consideration of both slopes and elevations of these relationships and their possible variation in different ecological contexts. MDPI 2020-02-26 /pmc/articles/PMC7150794/ /pubmed/32111083 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biology9030042 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Commentary
Gjoni, Vojsava
Glazier, Douglas Stewart
A Perspective on Body Size and Abundance Relationships across Ecological Communities
title A Perspective on Body Size and Abundance Relationships across Ecological Communities
title_full A Perspective on Body Size and Abundance Relationships across Ecological Communities
title_fullStr A Perspective on Body Size and Abundance Relationships across Ecological Communities
title_full_unstemmed A Perspective on Body Size and Abundance Relationships across Ecological Communities
title_short A Perspective on Body Size and Abundance Relationships across Ecological Communities
title_sort perspective on body size and abundance relationships across ecological communities
topic Commentary
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7150794/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32111083
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biology9030042
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