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The predator-prey power law: Biomass scaling across terrestrial and aquatic biomes

2015· article· en· 361 citations· W2167137586 on OpenAlex· 10.1126/science.aac6284

Why is this work in the frame?

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian affiliationAn author listed a Canadian institution. This is the only route the usual frame has.
Canadian funderA Canadian agency funded it. The work may carry no Canadian affiliation at all.

Full frame distilled prediction

Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

Candidate categories
Science and technology studies
Consensus categories
none
Domain
Candidate signal: noneConsensus signal: none
Study design
Candidate signal: Theoretical or conceptualConsensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
Genre
Candidate signal: EmpiricalConsensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score
0.043
Threshold uncertainty score
0.998
Validation status
machine_predicted_unvalidated · codex-gemma-dda1882f352a

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.005
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Opus teacher head0.052
GPT teacher head0.357
Teacher spread
0.305 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Abstract

Ecosystems exhibit surprising regularities in structure and function across terrestrial and aquatic biomes worldwide. We assembled a global data set for 2260 communities of large mammals, invertebrates, plants, and plankton. We find that predator and prey biomass follow a general scaling law with exponents consistently near ¾. This pervasive pattern implies that the structure of the biomass pyramid becomes increasingly bottom-heavy at higher biomass. Similar exponents are obtained for community production-biomass relations, suggesting conserved links between ecosystem structure and function. These exponents are similar to many body mass allometries, and yet ecosystem scaling emerges independently from individual-level scaling, which is not fully understood. These patterns suggest a greater degree of ecosystem-level organization than previously recognized and a more predictive approach to ecological theory.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

The record

Venue
Science
Topic
Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models
Field
Medicine
Canadian institutions
Okanagan University CollegePerimeter InstituteUniversity of British ColumbiaUniversity of GuelphUniversity of British Columbia, Okanagan CampusMcGill University
Funders
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaOntario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science
Keywords
BiomePredatorPredationBiomass (ecology)ScalingEcologyEnvironmental scienceApex predatorBiologyEcosystemMathematics
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes