SFI External Professor Brian Enquist is taking a new tack on a classical ecological question, and finding that old theories fall short in answering them.

The University of Arizona, where Enquist is an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, reports on his “functional biogeography” approach to investigating why tropical climates differ from temperate ones in terms of the number of species they support.

Enquist’s approach takes advantage of recent technology and large datasets to describe the functional traits of plants -- such as density, seed size, and height -- along a continuous spectrum. This differs from the classic approach of naming and counting individual species.

Enquist and his team found that temperate climates host a greater diversity of functions than the tropics, despite that tropical climates host a greater number of species.

Enquist says: “We looked at the diversity of functions—in other words, what plants do—and how these traits differ as we go from species-rich to species-poor environments. What we found blew us away. The results didn't clearly match any ecological theory.”

Read the article in UANews (October 6, 2014)

Read the special feature on functional biogeography in PNAS (September 15, 2014)