ArticleCommunications biology2022
An equation of state unifies diversity, productivity, abundance and biomass.
Article in Communications biology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatial and temporal heterogeneity foster high fish biodiversity in an Amazonian floodplain.Science advances · 2025Article
- Dominant species predict plant richness and biomass in global grasslands.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Species Richness Net Primary Productivity and the Water Balance Problem.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Article
- Biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships change in sign and magnitude across the Hill diversity spectrum.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Toward a cohesive understanding of ecological complexity.Science advances · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To advance understanding of biodiversity and ecosystem function, ecologists seek widely applicable relationships among species diversity and other ecosystem characteristics such as species productivity, biomass, and abundance. These metrics vary widely across ecosystems and no relationship among any combination of them that is valid across habitats, taxa, and spatial scales, has heretofore been found. Here we derive such a relationship, an equation of state, among species richness, energy flow, biomass, and abundance by combining results from the Maximum Entropy Theory of Ecology and the Metabolic Theory of Ecology. It accurately captures the relationship among these state variables in 42 data sets, including vegetation and arthropod communities, that span a wide variety of spatial scales and habitats. The success of our ecological equation of state opens opportunities for estimating difficult-to-measure state variables from measurements of others, adds support for two current theories in ecology, and is a step toward unification in ecology.
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Registered trials
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