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Science 15 December 2000:
Vol. 290. no. 5499, pp. 2084 - 2086
DOI: 10.1126/science.290.5499.2084
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Perspectives

ECOLOGY:
Species-Area Relations in Tropical Forests

Robert M. May and Michael P. H. Stumpf

A power law called the species-area relationship describes the finding that the number of species is proportional to the size of the area in which they are found, raised to an exponent (usually, a number between 0.2 and 0.3). In their Perspective, May and Stumpf discuss new results from a survey of five tropical forest census areas containing a total of a million trees. They explain how this large data set can be used to fine-tune the existing power law so that it provides a better prediction of species diversity in small census samples.

The authors are in the Zoology Department, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK. E-mail: robert.may{at}zoo.ox.ac.uk; michael.stumpf{at}zoo.ox.ac.uk

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
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Observations on related ecological exponents.
T. R. E. Southwood, R. M. May, and G. Sugihara (2006)
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Climate change, species-area curves and the extinction crisis.
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