PARENT SESSION
Oral Session # 16: Ecological Modeling I.
Presiding: C Ray
Tuesday, August 5. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, SITCC Meeting Room 102.

Allometric life histories and population energetics.

Economo, Evan^*,1, Kerkhoff, Andrew¹, Enquist, Brian¹, ¹ Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Tucson, AZ, USA

ABSTRACT- Establishing connections between individual physiology and ecosystem level processes is of critical importance to ecology. An important step towards that goal is the linking of individual and population level energetics. Ecologists have long recognized that individual growth curves and stage structured mortality rates can be used to quantify the production and efficiency of stationary populations. However, these models have remained phenomenological with respect to species specific growth and mortality functions. Recently it has been shown that organisms across diverse taxonomic groups obey a universal growth model. In addition, advances in life history theory have demonstrated links between growth physiology and life history parameters, including mortality. Here we combine traditional theoretical approaches to modeling population energetics with allometric models of growth and life history to construct a general model of energetics in stationary populations. The model approximates the scaling of production and efficiency in mammalian populations.

Key words: allometry, scaling, life history, population energetics