A new article coming up in Nature by David Storch and Petr Keil and Walter Jetz calculates continental scale SAR and EAR relationships for amphibians, birds and mammals. They find that, after correcting for mean range size of the taxa, there are nearly universal relationships across taxa and continents. While the SARs are clearly not…
Last year, I blogged about a Nature paper by Fangliang He and Stephen Hubbell, which claims that conventional extinction predictions based on species-area relationships are overestimated. They suggest extinction-area relationships as more appropriate to estimate extinction risk from habitat loss. My old post can be found here. After two short replies by Brooks and colleagues…
Allow me this pun: there can be no doubt that power laws are abundant in Nature – rumor has it that finding scale-free (power-law) distributions in a system is a prime ingredient for a successful publication in this journal, as in its counterpart Science. As proof, see just a few recent articles about Levy walks…
I’m lagging a little behind the news, but maybe it’s also an advantage to write about this issue after the first smoke has cleared. The topic is a paper by Fangliang He and Stephen Hubbell that appeared in Nature two weeks ago and that has sparked considerable controversy. Basically, the authors claim that “conventional” extinction…
theoretical ecology 