Universal Ecological Patterns in College Basketball Communities

Robert J Warren, David K Skelly, Oswald J Schmitz and Mark A Bradford

PLOS ONE, 2011, vol. 6, issue 3, 1-4

Abstract: The rank abundance of common and rare species within ecological communities is remarkably consistent from the tropics to the tundra. This invariant patterning provides one of ecology's most enduring and unified tenets: most species rare and a few very common. Increasingly, attention is focused upon elucidating biological mechanisms that explain these species abundance distributions (SADs), but these evaluations remain controversial. We show that college basketball wins generate SADs just like those observed in ecological communities. Whereas college basketball wins are structured by competitive interactions, the result produces a SAD pattern indistinguishable from random wins. We also show that species abundance data for tropical trees exhibits a significant-digit pattern consistent with data derived from complex structuring forces. These results cast doubt upon the ability of SAD analysis to resolve ecological mechanism, and their patterning may reflect statistical artifact as much as biological processes.

Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017342 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 17342&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0017342

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017342

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().