Universal Ecological Patterns in College Basketball Communities
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...
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ftrepec:oai:RePEc:plo:pone00:0017342 2024-04-14T08:20:35+00:00 Universal Ecological Patterns in College Basketball Communities Robert J Warren II David K Skelly Oswald J Schmitz Mark A Bradford https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017342 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017342&type=printable unknown https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017342 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017342&type=printable article ftrepec 2024-03-19T10:35:04Z 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. Article in Journal/Newspaper Tundra RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) |
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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. |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Robert J Warren II David K Skelly Oswald J Schmitz Mark A Bradford |
spellingShingle |
Robert J Warren II David K Skelly Oswald J Schmitz Mark A Bradford Universal Ecological Patterns in College Basketball Communities |
author_facet |
Robert J Warren II David K Skelly Oswald J Schmitz Mark A Bradford |
author_sort |
Robert J Warren II |
title |
Universal Ecological Patterns in College Basketball Communities |
title_short |
Universal Ecological Patterns in College Basketball Communities |
title_full |
Universal Ecological Patterns in College Basketball Communities |
title_fullStr |
Universal Ecological Patterns in College Basketball Communities |
title_full_unstemmed |
Universal Ecological Patterns in College Basketball Communities |
title_sort |
universal ecological patterns in college basketball communities |
url |
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017342 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017342&type=printable |
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Tundra |
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Tundra |
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https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017342 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017342&type=printable |
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