The Importance of Scaling in Biodiversity

Abstract

Our main tenet is that biodiversity should be studied as a function of scale. The epitome of a similar approach was that of Mandelbrot in his studies on fractals. Although biodiversity patterns may not necessarily follow the mathematical description of fractals, we argue that much can be learnt if we adopt the perspective of studying biodiversity across scales. A case where the concept of scaling is routinely applied in ecology is the species-area relationship, a relationship describing how the number of species (species richness) changes, i.e. scales, as a function of area. However, the importance of scaling is often neglected in ecology. For instance, it is seldomly applied to another component of diversity, the relative abundances of species, being the latter often described using the proportion of individuals of each species. We exemplify the application of scaling to the species relative abundance with our own work. One of the advantages of studying biodiversity under the framework of scaling is that patterns tend to emerge. These patterns emerge from a myriad of processes and their respective interactions. However, understanding the role of each process individually, or quantifying its role in the community functioning, may be empirically impossible. Thus, we argue from theoretical and practical perspectives, including approaches to conservation problems, that we should concentrate our endeavours on the quantitative description of known patterns, as it is often done in other basic and applied sciences, even if that implies temporarily relegating to a secondary position the detailed analyses of the underlying mechanisms.