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."
- 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."
- 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"
Summary/Main points
1. Main Question:
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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- What do Smith et al. (2008) think are the seminal contributions of Brown and Maurer (1989)?
- What makes this article different from Brown and Maurer (1989)?
- Are articles like this one useful?
I wonder whether any macroecologists focus on behavioral flexibility and differences in particular behaviors across large temporal/spatial scales. I'd be really interested in learning more about that.
ReplyDeleteLooking at Fig. 7 in this paper I found an interesting pattern in the body size of certain animal groups. Between 50 and 40 million years, there is an obvious drop in body size in several groups; Rodentia, Multituberculata, Marsupiala, Insectivora and Dermoptera. There is also an obvious increase in body size is other groups like Carnivora. A gap is created in the weight of mammals around 1Kg. This suggests something was changing during that 10 million year period to trigger those patterns. I would consider a global environmental change.
ReplyDeleteOn page 125, they go into body-size distributions and the idea that most of them are unimodal, right skewed with some exceptions. The paper says that "some ectothermic vertebrates and invertebrate groups appear to demonstrate unimodal left-skewed body-size distributions." There doesn't seem to be an explanation, why is this?
ReplyDeleteThe figures in Brown and Maurer are good representations on the ideas and data talked about in the text. However, the figure captions go into better explanations, while the text remains broad. This made it hard to follow the discussion. The summary in Smith et al did a much better job explaining the key points in macroecology.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting field that needs to be more encouraged by the scientific communities worldwide. I have been kept mixing the term "macroecology with macroevolution" because I have not really paid attention to macroecology as a separate field from ecology or macroevolutionary patterns linked disciplines. However, after reading the details and the type of analysis the field does, it is certain that it has a lot more complicated challenges to overcome first to solve complex problems. Parasitology is my field of research and I have been thinking about some possible linkage between my field to macroecology. "Systematics", we generate trees but often end up having weaker explanations of each node "macroecological and biogeographical" scenarios. It is really hard to explain the relationships among the relationship between taxa but with help of macroecology, it can be approached by the host history and its broad pattern to the biogeography.
ReplyDeleteFigure 2. is interesting especially the subject area "paleontology" is the fewest. It seems like the field "macroecology" is impossible without paleontology but the fewest number of papers published. Maybe it is trending now towards other fields.
I liked the idea of Human Macroecology. This concept is something I feel we tend to put aside, but as an animal species we are also under the scope of Macroecological processes, and we are imposing some macro-scaled processes as well. I also liked that as time has passed, the macroecological studies have also considered other taxa aside from birds and mammals. I wonder, though, if the databases of other taxa are as robust and complete as the ones for birds and mammals.
ReplyDeleteTen years before this review was published, Brown predicted a shift from pattern to process. Since it has been another ten years since this review, is the focus starting to shift from process to application in areas like conservation biology? Would you (Dr Lyons) add or change anything if you were to write this review today? In recent years, have any “future challenges” appeared that were not predicted by this review?
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ReplyDeleteI enjoy how this article is another version of what you went over in class. I don't know much about macroecology, but I think it was cool reading the debate of how macroecology should be handled compared to how it is executed and observed. I also enjoyed learning about the correlations found within mammals, I've heard about some of this information, but it's nice to read a little more in depth about it.
ReplyDeleteReading about macroecology invading other fields, and specially about human macroecology reminded me about a book from Jared Diamond title Guns, germs and steel. Although he doesn´t acknowledge it in the book, I think he uses a macroecological approach by comparing human groups over space and time to explain the current distribution of power and resources among human societies.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting field. I certainly did not know how much Macro-ecology has grown in the past years since most of my classes have been more about normal ecology. I'm most interested in human/medical field of this paper.
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