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Science 8 June 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5830, p. 1425
DOI: 10.1126/science.1140372
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Technical Comments

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

Bill Shipley,1* Denis Vile,1,2,3 Éric Garnier3

We maintain that there is no circularity or structural bias in our model that inflates its predictive ability beyond the sampling bias inherent in the r 2 statistic. When replacing observed average traits by environmental variables, the generality and predictive ability depends on one's empirical ability to predict these average values. Finally, maximizing rather than minimizing entropy given constraints is justified by axioms of information theory and is not an ecological assumption.

1 Département de biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec J1K 2R1, Canada.
2 Present address: INRA UR874 Agronomie, Équipe Fonctionnement et Gestion de l'Écosystème Prairial, 234 avenue du Brézet, F-63100 Clermont-Ferrand, France.
3 Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, CNRS, UMR 5175, 1919 Route de Mende, 34293 Montpellier Cedex 5, France.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: bill.shipley{at}usherbrooke.ca

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