2015/02/28 by Michael Kearney, Tiago Domingos, Roger M. Nisbet · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Engineering · Mathematics · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Climate Change Policy and Economics #Thermodynamic and Exergetic Analyses of Power and Cooling Systems #Energy budget #Ecology #Environmental science #Energy (signal processing) #Economics #Mathematics #Biology #Statistics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/biosci/biv013
openalex publication_date 2015/02/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/16
Marquet and colleagues’ (2014) recent discussion of the role of theory in ecology emphasizes the need for “efficient” theories. They defined such theories as being capable of making predictions of given phenomena with the fewest possible free parameters relative to rival theories. In providing examples of what they consider to be “inefficient” ecological theories, they point to dynamic energy budget (DEB) theory on the basis that it is rich in free parameters, presumably relative to the metabolic theory of ecology (MTE). This conclusion is incorrect. A parameter count must be evaluated relative to the number of processes explained. With 14 parameters, the standard DEB model captures an organism's development, feeding, growth, maintenance, metabolic heating, reproduction, and senescence under any sequence of environmental fluctuations in food and temperature in one coherent framework across the whole life cycle: about 1.5 parameters per process. But, for less specific applications, many fewer parameters are required. For example, when the DEB model for ontogenetic growth is pared back to consider the same number of processes described by the corresponding MTE model, it reduces to the von Bertalanffy model and has a comparable number of parameters (Kooijman 2010, Kearney and White 2012).