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Ecology

Scaling, energetics and diversity

Nature volume 401, pages 865–866 (1999)Cite this article

There are few established laws in ecology. Most ecologists have to contend with systems of bewildering complexity, in which it is hard to separate the wood from the trees. Scientific disciplines without a good framework of rules and laws are generally considered the poor relations of their ilk, and, as human impacts on our planet appear to have reached alarming levels, the need for reliable ecological theory is hard to overstate. The discovery and demonstration of new laws in ecology — such as the Universal Growth Law for plants described by Enquist et al.1 on page 907 of this issue — is thus particularly noteworthy.

The existence of power relations (allometric relationships), whereby biological variables tend to increase or decrease in relation to body mass raised to the power of a quarter or three quarters, has been known for over half a century. But only recently has the realization of the ubiquity and generality of this relationship, which occurs at many levels of biological organization, elevated it to the status of a biological law2. One of the best-known quarter-power scaling relationships is that between body mass and metabolic rate in animals, which it now appears holds over an extraordinary 27 orders of magnitude of size2. Enquist and colleagues' work1 is the the latest step in the determination of analogous allometric relationships for plants, with potentially wide-ranging implications for ecological science.

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Figure 1: Macroecological insights into plant diversity.

References

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  1. School of Geography, University of Oxford, Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB, UK

    Robert J. Whittaker

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  1. Robert J. Whittaker
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Correspondence to Robert J. Whittaker.

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Whittaker, R. Scaling, energetics and diversity. Nature 401, 865–866 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/44732

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