Smith et al. 2008

Smith, F.A., Lyons, S. K., Ernest, S. K. E., and Brown, J. H. 2008. Macroecology: more than the division of food and space among species on continents. Progress in Physical Geography 32: 115-138.


Paper Authors: Felisa Smith, Kathleen Lyons, Morgan Ernest, James Brown


Felisa Smith: 

• PhD from University of California, Irvine
• Professor of Biology at University of New Mexico
• Research interests: "Simply put, I am interested in body size. My research aims to understand why organisms are the size they are, what the ecological and evolutionary consequences are of being a certain size, and the complex and dynamic trade-offs between physiology, life history, environment, phylogeny, and past history."

S. Kathleen Lyons: 

• PhD from the University of Chicago
• Assistant Professor of Biology at University of Nebraska - Lincoln
• Research interests: "I am interested in the factors affecting and controlling species diversity at multiple scales across both space and time. Moreover, I am particularly interested in the effects of global climate change on species diversity and use the fossil record of mammals over the last 40,000 years to evaluate how current changes in global climate may affect diversity patterns in the future."

S. K. Morgan Ernest:

• PhD from the University of New Mexico
• Associate Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida.
• Research interests: "Most, but not all, of our research focuses on community ecology. Understanding the long-term dynamics of communities is a common theme - examples of current research topics include: stability of community-level properties in response to perturbations, complexities in consumer-resource dynamics in deserts, and mechanisms that facilitate long-term coexistence"

James H. Brown: see paper #1

Summary/Main points
1. Main Question: 

• background: This is a review paper meant to discuss the current state of macro ecology.

• main questions: What is the current state of macroecology, what are some technological advances that have allowed for the growth of macroecology, and what are some recent advances made using a macro ecological approach?

2. Methods:

• data: used searches from online research paper databases such as the Web of Knowledge. Also used data from previously published papers to create figures that highlight the results from those papers.

• methods: survey the literature for macroecology papers, review the history of the field, recreate figures from previously published papers.

3. Results: 

• History of Macroecology: 
• macroecological approaches are much older than the term - early papers from the late 1800s and early 1900s were identifying macroecological patterns and develop macroecological techniques.
• speculate that the amount of field collecting done for museums had reached a critical mass by the early 1900s that allowed for macroecological studies.
• macroecology fell out of favor in the 1970s, most likely because of the difficulty in inferring process from pattern.
• macroecology experienced a resurgence with the advent of personal computers, the increase in computing power and the web.

• Current state of the field: 
• macroecology has grown rapidly.
• metabolic scale theory is the subject of much research and is controversial. This theory say that the relationship between mass and metabolic rate is E = M^3/4 and that this relationship can explain many macroecological patterns.
• much of macroecology is devoted to examining the relationships between body size and other species traits.
• understanding patterns of species abundance is an active area of macroecology.
• macroecology is being used to understand the dynamics of ecological systems over time.
• macroecological approaches are invading other fields.

• Future of Macroecology: 
• macroecology is shifting toward developing and testing hypotheses, rather than just identifying patterns.
• continued development of appropriate statistical tools and methods.
• human macroecology is likely to be a fruitful area of research.

4. Conclusions/Inference

• Macroecology is great, but some challenges remain with respect to data collection, funding, spanning disciplinary boundaries, etc.

Some of the themes from this paper?

o   Importance of data, computers, and statistics

o   Approach to science not a field

o   Long history in ecology

o   Research themes: body size, abundance, distribution, time and space

o   Future directions: medical/human, technology, social systems, etc. 

§  Study microbes ‘species’ a lose concept anyway. Use of gene as ‘particles’.

o   Pattern searching vs. using patterns to test for processes.

5. Questions: 

1. What do Smith et al. (2008) think are the seminal contributions of Brown and Maurer (1989)?
2. What makes this article different from Brown and Maurer (1989)?
3. Are articles like this one useful?