Developing a "gravitational theory" for ecology

An important breakthrough by EPFL researchers could lead to the discovery of a set of general laws applicable to the environmental sciences. Is there a link between a given species' body mass and its abundance, or between the size of an ecosystem and its level of biodiversity? Ecologists often find that similar relationships of this type exist in different ecosystems. These relationships are called scaling laws, and they have been shown to apply in both marine and terrestrial environments and to various types of organisms (e.g., microorganisms, mammals and trees). But until now, no clear link has been drawn between these laws. That is now changing: in a recent study, EPFL researchers proved the existence of common macroecological patterns exhibited by these ostensibly independent scaling laws. These patterns could even lead to the discovery of a set of general laws governing the environmental sciences. The study was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) .