The macroecology of community energy use in terrestrial vertebrates

Abstract

Energy is a fundamental macroecological property as it governs all ecological processes and interactions. Understanding variation in community energy use and its correlations is crucial to knowing how communities function across the globe. As an organism’s metabolic rate equates to its rate of energy flow, individual rates can predict community-level functioning. Here, daily rates of community energy flow are calculated for 118 bat, 109 bird, and 196 non-volant small mammal inventories from around the world. These were scaled up from individual metabolic rates that were obtained for the 416 bat, 1880 bird, and 562 small mammal species present in the samples. While controlling for spatial autocorrelation, rates were contrasted and compared to various ecological, environmental, geographic, and anthropogenic variables, using a method of sequential regression that renders the variables orthogonal to each other, thus addressing the issue of collinearity. In all groups, there is a strong positive correlation between community energy use and community mass, with biomass being the primary determinant of community energy flow. More surprisingly, there are strong biogeographic differences within and between groups. Bat communities have consistently higher rates of energy flow in the Neotropics, while small mammal communities have higher rates relative to mass in Holarctic realms. Investigations of individual-level patterns reveal that these differences are a direct result of contrasting patterns of abundance, average individual mass, and metabolic rates. These results indicate that community energy use is strongly linked to differences in ecology and evolutionary history within and among groups.