Ecology. Species-area relations in tropical forests.
A power law called the species-area relationship describes the finding that the number of species is proportional to the size of the area in which they are found, raised to an exponent (usually, a number between 0.2 and 0.3). In their Perspective, May and Stumpf discuss new results from a survey of five tropical forest census areas containing a total of a million trees. They explain how this large data set can be used to fine-tune the existing power law so that it provides a better prediction of species diversity in small census samples.
May
R M
RM
Zoology Department, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK. robert.may@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Stumpf
M P
MP
D017753:Ecosystem; D007194:India; D008296:Malaysia; D008433:Mathematics; D010176:Panama; D013785:Thailand; D014197:Trees; D014329:Tropical Climate