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Science 2 February 2001:
Vol. 291. no. 5505, pp. 864 - 868
DOI: 10.1126/science.291.5505.864
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Reports
Scale Dependence in Plant Biodiversity
M. J. Crawley,*
J. E. Harral
The relationship between the number of species and the area sampled
is one of the oldest and best-documented patterns in community ecology.
Several theoretical models and field data from a wide range of plant
and animal taxa suggest that the slope, z, of a graph of the
logarithm of species richness against the logarithm of area is roughly
constant, with z  0.25. We collected replicated and
randomized plant data at 11 spatial scales from 0.01 to 108
square meters in Great Britain which show that the slope of the log-log
plot is not constant, but varies systematically with spatial scale, and
from habitat to habitat at the same spatial scale. Values of
z were low (0.1 to 0.2) at small scales (<100 square meters), high (0.4 to 0.5) at intermediate scales (1 hectare to 10 square kilometers), and low again (0.1 to 0.2) for the largest scale
transitions (e.g., East Berks to all of Berkshire). Instead of one
process determining changes in species richness across a wide range of
scales, different processes might determine plant biodiversity at
different spatial scales.
Department of Biology, Natural Environment Research Council Centre
for Population Biology, Imperial College, Silwood Park, Ascot SL5 7PY,
UK.
*
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
m.crawley{at}ic.ac.uk
Read the Full Text
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