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50‐year anniversary of Lloyd's “mean crowding”: Ideas on patchy distributions
Author(s) -
Wade Michael J.,
Fitzpatrick Courtney L.,
Lively Curtis M.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of animal ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.134
H-Index - 157
eISSN - 1365-2656
pISSN - 0021-8790
DOI - 10.1111/1365-2656.12854
Subject(s) - crowding , intraspecific competition , metric (unit) , degree (music) , ecology , competition (biology) , heuristic , statistical physics , computer science , mathematics , mathematical economics , artificial intelligence , biology , psychology , physics , economics , cognitive psychology , operations management , acoustics
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Monte B. Lloyd's “Mean Crowding” (1967) paper, in which he introduced a metric that accounts for an individual's experience of conspecific density. Mean crowding allows ecologists to measure the degree of spatial aggregation of individuals in a manner relevant to intraspecific competition for resources. We take the concept of mean crowding a step beyond its most common usage and that it has a mathematical relationship to many of the most important concepts in ecology and evolutionary biology. Mean crowding, a first‐order approximation of the degree of nonrandomness in a distribution, can function as a powerful heuristic that can unify concepts across disciplines in a more general way that Lloyd originally envisioned.