Separating macroecological pattern and process: comparing ecological, economic, and geological systems.

Benjamin Blonder,Lindsey Sloat,Brian J Enquist,Brian Mcgill

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112850

Benjamin Blonder, Lindsey Sloat + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0112850

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Abstract

Theories of biodiversity rest on several macroecological patterns describing the relationship between species abundance and diversity. A central problem is that all theories make similar predictions for these patterns despite disparate assumptions. A troubling implication is that these patterns may not reflect anything unique about organizational principles of biology or the functioning of ecological systems. To test this, we analyze five datasets from ecological, economic, and geological systems that describe the distribution of objects across categories in the United States. At the level of functional form (‘first-order effects’), these patterns are not unique to ecological systems, indicating they may reveal little about biological process. However, we show that mechanism can be better revealed in the scale-dependency of first-order patterns (‘second-order effects’). These results provide a roadmap for biodiversity theory to move beyond traditional patterns, and also suggest ways in which macroecological theory can constrain the dynamics of economic systems.

Highlights

Decades of research have identified four central patterns that together describe the broad-scale organization of biological diversity [1]
Our analyses show that, when data are aggregating at a continental spatial scale, each dataset is characterized by the expected first order effects
We found that second-order effects can distinguish between these datasets, suggesting the operation of different processes structuring each system across a range of scales

Summary

Introduction

Decades of research have identified four central patterns that together describe the broad-scale organization of biological diversity [1] These include the: abundance distribution of species [2]; the relationship between species richness and area [3,4]; the decrease in assemblage similarity with increasing distance [5]; and the spatial dispersion of individuals within species [6,7]. One potentially troubling implication for ecology is that these patterns may not reflect anything unique about organizational principles of biology or the functioning of ecological systems [11,18,19]. Instead, they may be a statistical inevitability for any complex system with a large number of variables influencing the system’s dynamics [20–

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