title: The ecology of echo.
abstract: Echo is a generic ecosystem model in which evolving agents are situated in a resource-limited environment. The Echo model is described, and the behavior of Echo is evaluated on two well-studied measures of ecological diversity: relative species abundance and the species-area scaling relation. In simulation experiments, these measures are used to compare the behavior of Echo with that of a neutral model, in which selection on agent genotypes is random. These simulations show that the evolutionary component of Echo makes a significant contribution to its behavior and that Echo shows good qualitative agreement with naturally occurring species abundance distributions and species-area scaling relations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque 87131, USA. pth@santafe.edu
authors.forename: P T
authors.initials: PT
authors.lastname: Hraber
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Forrest
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D017753:Ecosystem; D008954:Models, Biological; D009154:Mutation