Strong and weak tests of macroecological theory

By Brian J. McGill. 2003

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4215dcf098d802d86f661a8de7c1299259f66470

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Citations in the corpus

Mechanisms in macroecology: AWOL or purloined letter? Towards a pragmatic view of mechanism (2010, background): “When random variables are multiplied together, causing their log transforms to be added, a normal distribution on a log-transformed scale (the lognormal distribution) is generated (MacArthur 1960, May 1975, Limpert et al. 2001, McGill 2003a).”
The lognormal distribution is not an appropriate null hypothesis for the species–abundance distribution (2005, methodology): “…(1948), and then to use a χ 2 test on the deviation from expectation of the observed values for the bins (the classes into which species are grouped, e.g. McGill 2003a; Volkov 412 M. Williamson & K. J. Gaston © 2005 British Ecological Society, Journal of Animal Ecology , 74 , 409–422 et al .”
A flexible multi-scale approach for standardised recording of plant species richness patterns (2009, background): “…as possible (preferably five orders of magnitude or more) because otherwise discrimination of different species–area models is hardly possible (cf. McGill, 2003; Dengler, 2008); (ii) they should be evenly spaced on logarithmic scale (i.e. form a geometric series) since otherwise species–area…”
Modes of speciation and the neutral theory of biodiversity (2007, background): “It has been argued that species abundance data cannot discriminate between different models of community structure (McGill 2003a,b, Volkov et al. 2005).”
Null Versus Neutral Models: What's The Difference? (2006, methodology): “Random sampling from a regional source pool has been used as a null model in ecology (Graves and Gotelli 1983, Cornell and Lawton 1992, McGill 2003c, Dolman and Blackburn 2004) and paleoecology (Holterhoff 1996), but ecology would probably benefit from further research into the application of this…”
Species abundance distributions: moving beyond single prediction theories to integration within an ecological framework. (2007, background): “For example, neutral models (Caswell 1976; Bell 2000; Hubbell 2001) are stochastic population dynamic models but also branching process models (Etienne & Olff 2004b), and the lognormal can be the limit of population dynamics (Engen & Lande 1996b) or niche partitioning (Bulmer 1974; Sugihara 1980).”
Does Mother Nature really prefer rare species or are log‐left‐skewed SADs a sampling artefact? (2003, background): “Many ecologists also feel relief at rejecting a simple lognormal distribution (which has no skew), since the lognormal distribution does not require a biological mechanism to explain the SAD pattern (May 1975; McGill 2003 ) despite the SADs fundamental importance.”
Diversity : between neutrality and structure (2006, background): “(2002), McGill (2003a) and Mouquet and Loreau (2003).”
A comparison of the species–time relationship across ecosystems and taxonomic groups (2006, methodology): “…difference in the fit of these two functions is typically small, and in some cases difficult to distinguish even when the real function is known (McGill 2003), the two functions have different implications for how community composition changes over time and thus could point toward different…”
Which function describes the species–area relationship best? A review and empirical evaluation (2009, background): “Moreover, one can argue that a model that produces consistently good extrapolations depicts the real nature of the SAR better than one that only fits well for a given data set within a given range of areas, as curve fitting is generally a ‘weak test’ (McGill, 2003).”
How is diversity related to species turnover through time (2007, background): “Patterns of species turnover through time are analogous to species area and species abundance distributions in that the shapes of particular functions or the values of statistically derived parameters are often uninformative for distinguishing among competing hypotheses (Williams 1943, McGill 2003).”
Statistical mechanics of ecological systems: Neutral theory and beyond (2015, background): “Although the theory has been highly criticized by many ecologists as being unrealistic [38, 99, 108, 123, 124], it does provide very good results”
Species abundance and the distribution of specialization in host–parasite interaction networks (2005, background): “© 2005 British Ecological Society, Journal of Animal Ecology , 74 , 946–955 the model actually operates, because a given pattern can usually result from more than one model (McGill 2003).”
MEASUREMENT OF INTERACTION STRENGTH IN NATURE (2005, methodology): “A weakness of these analyses, however, is that the models are tuned to the data with several unmeasured parameters (McGill 2003).”
The gambin model provides a superior fit to species abundance distributions with a single free parameter: evidence, implementation and interpretation (2014, methodology): “As the choice of goodness of fi t test has been found to infl uence results (McGill 2003) we also used a Kolmogorov – Smirnov test.”