Supercomputers Take Down Ecological Theory
The Botanical Information and Ecological Network (BEIN), working with the iPlant Collaborative and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), has overturned a popular theory in ecology by determining that there is “… no relationship between the diversity of species and the range of ecological functioning.”
The results are part of a massive study on the plant diversity of the New World that uses supercomputing techniques to compute geographic range estimates for more than 100,000 species.