Biodiversity power laws

Abstract

The last ten years have been marked by important discoveries and scientificadvances in our understanding of biodiversity. The emergence of new fields,such as bioinformatics, ecoinformatics, and computational ecology (Helly et al.,1995; Spengler, 2000; Green et al., 2005) has brought about an informationalrevolution by making available massive data sets on the composition, distribu-tion and abundance of biodiversity from local to global scales and from genesto ecosystems. This has in turn changed biodiversity sciences, expanding thescale of analysis of ecological systems wherein biodiversity resides. Whilethe 1970s and 1980s were marked by studies at local scales, the 1990s weremarked by gaining access to regional, continental and global scale analyses.In parallel, and in part as a consequence of the above trend, there has been ashift from approaches that emphasize the highly variable and idiosyncraticnature of ecological systems to a view that emphasizes the action of firstprinciples, natural laws and zeroth order approaches (the macroscopicapproach hereafter).The small-scale approach can be illustrated by a representative quotationfrom Diamond and Case (1986, p. x): ‘‘The answers to general ecological ques-tions are rarely universal laws, like those of physics. Instead, the answers areconditional statements such as: for a community of species with properties A