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Science 8 June 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5830, p. 1425
DOI: 10.1126/science.1138810
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Technical Comments

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

Stephen H. Roxburgh1* and Karel Mokany2

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.

1 School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre, Ensis, Post Office Box E4008, Kingston, ACT 2604, Australia.
2 School of Botany and Zoology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: stephen.roxburgh{at}ensisjv.com

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)