Comment on "From plant traits to plant communities: a statistical mechanistic approach to biodiversity".
Shipley et al. (Reports, 3 November 2006, p. 812) developed a quantitative method for predicting the relative abundance of species from measured traits. We show that the method can have high explanatory power even when all trait and abundance data are randomly and independently generated, because of a mathematical dependence between the observations and predictions. We also suggest a potential solution to this problem.
Roxburgh
Stephen H
SH
School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre, Ensis, Post Office Box E4008, Kingston, ACT 2604, Australia. stephen.roxburgh@ensisjv.com
Mokany
Karel
K
D044822:Biodiversity; D004463:Ecology / Q000379:methods*; D008433:Mathematics; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D018521:Plant Physiological Phenomena; D010944:Plants; D011156:Population Density; D013223:Statistics as Topic