Comment on "From Plant Traits to Plant Communities: A Statistical Mechanistic Approach to Biodiversity"

Shipley et al . (Reports, 3 November 2006, p. 812) predicted plant community composition and relative abundances with a high level of accuracy by maximizing Shannon's index of information entropy (species diversity), subject to constraints on plant trait averages. We show that the entropy maxim...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inScience (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Vol. 316; no. 5830; p. 1425
Main Authors Marks, Christian O., Muller-Landau, Helene C.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States The American Association for the Advancement of Science 08.06.2007
Subjects
Biodiversity
Community composition
Ecology - methods
Entropy
Models, Biological
Models, Statistical
Plant communities
Plant Physiological Phenomena
Plants
Population Density
Species diversity
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN0036-8075
1095-9203
1095-9203
DOI10.1126/science.1140190

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Summary:Shipley et al . (Reports, 3 November 2006, p. 812) predicted plant community composition and relative abundances with a high level of accuracy by maximizing Shannon's index of information entropy (species diversity), subject to constraints on plant trait averages. We show that the entropy maximization assumption is relatively unimportant and that the high accuracy is due largely to a statistical effect.
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ISSN:0036-8075
1095-9203
1095-9203
DOI:10.1126/science.1140190