ArticlePLoS biology2014
Emergent global patterns of ecosystem structure and function from a mechanistic general ecosystem model.
Article in PLoS biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 222 citations in OpenAlex.
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- The trophic distribution of biomass in ecosystems with co-occurring wildlife and livestock.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Assessing contemporary Arctic habitat availability for a woolly mammoth proxy.Scientific reports · 2024Article
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- On the History of Ecosystem Dynamical Modeling: The Rise and Promises of Qualitative Models.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- A Conceptual Framework to Integrate Biodiversity, Ecosystem Function, and Ecosystem Service Models.Bioscience · 2022Review
- Process-explicit models reveal the structure and dynamics of biodiversity patterns.Science advances · 2022Review
- A unified model of species abundance, genetic diversity, and functional diversity reveals the mechanisms structuring ecological communities.Molecular ecology resources · 2021Article
- Estimating global biomass and biogeochemical cycling of marine fish with and without fishing.Science advances · 2021Article
- Towards an ecosystem model of infectious disease.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
- On the robustness of an eastern boundary upwelling ecosystem exposed to multiple stressors.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Linking dimensions of data on global marine animal diversity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Evolution of habitat preference in 243 species of Bent-toed geckos (GenusEcology and evolution · 2020Article
- Climate drives the geography of marine consumption by changing predator communities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Non-linear changes in modelled terrestrial ecosystems subjected to perturbations.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Relationship between conservation biology and ecology shown through machine reading of 32,000 articles.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2020Article
- Scaling-up biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research.Ecology letters · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Anthropogenic activities are causing widespread degradation of ecosystems worldwide, threatening the ecosystem services upon which all human life depends. Improved understanding of this degradation is urgently needed to improve avoidance and mitigation measures. One tool to assist these efforts is predictive models of ecosystem structure and function that are mechanistic: based on fundamental ecological principles. Here we present the first mechanistic General Ecosystem Model (GEM) of ecosystem structure and function that is both global and applies in all terrestrial and marine environments. Functional forms and parameter values were derived from the theoretical and empirical literature where possible. Simulations of the fate of all organisms with body masses between 10 µg and 150,000 kg (a range of 14 orders of magnitude) across the globe led to emergent properties at individual (e.g., growth rate), community (e.g., biomass turnover rates), ecosystem (e.g., trophic pyramids), and macroecological scales (e.g., global patterns of trophic structure) that are in general agreement with current data and theory. These properties emerged from our encoding of the biology of, and interactions among, individual organisms without any direct constraints on the properties themselves. Our results indicate that ecologists have gathered sufficient information to begin to build realistic, global, and mechanistic models of ecosystems, capable of predicting a diverse range of ecosystem properties and their response to human pressures.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.