Scaling in Ecosystems and the Linkage of Macroecological Laws

Scaling provides an elegant framework for understanding power-law behavior and deducing relationships between critical exponents. We demonstrate that scaling theory can be generalized to develop a framework for the analysis of diverse empirical macroecological relationships traditionally treated as independent. Our mathematical arguments predict links between the species-area relationship, the relative species abundance and community size spectra in excellent accord with empirical data.