| Popis: |
Energy is life’s main currency. Understanding the requirements, flow, and availability of energy among organisms then becomes synonym for our understanding of the sustainability of biodiversity. In this regard, metabolic scaling and coexistence theories have been pivotal in mathematizing the energy consumption by an organism and the energy transformation across organisms, respectively. Yet, a simple formal integration of these theories has remained overdue. Here, we provide a tractable and scalable framework to link metabolic scaling relationships at the population level and the persistence of ecological communities under different environmental conditions. Specifically, this framework focuses on exploring the dependence of community feasibility on body size. This integration predicts that the exponent defining the dependence of pairwise interaction effects on body sizes, but not the distribution of body sizes itself, is linked to the optimal distribution of environmental carrying capacities compatible with community persistence. Additionally, this integration predicts that the compatibility between community persistence and distributions of environmental carrying capacities is maximized when interaction effects are homogeneous across all pairs of interacting populations. We believe this integration can open up new opportunities to increase our understanding of how metabolic scaling relationships at the population level have evolved to optimize process at the community level. |
