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Article Excerpt
Ecological Stoichiometry: The Biology of Elements from Molecules to the Biosphere. Robert Warner Sterner and James J. Elser. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002.440 pp., illus. $75.00 (ISBN 0691074909 cloth).

Ecology struggles to understand the problems of complex "middle-number" systems. In these systems, the objects of study are too numerous to be treated as individuals (individuals in a population, leaves on a tree, microbes in the soil) but not numerous enough, and existing in too many configurations, for simple statistical models to apply. As a result, much of the theory seeks to reduce the dimensionality of problems and find some axis of variation along which the system's behavior becomes predictable. This approach results in some relatively simple independent variable that is linked to response syndromes that may then be characterized and organized. Examples of this include climate and vegatation pattern (e.g., the Holdridge system, which predicts biogeographic pattern as a consequence of climate) or Rosenzweig's work linking productivity to climate. Other notable examples include succession (where the organizing variable becomes time since disturbance) and the stability-diversity hypothesis. Techniques to reduce the dimensionality of complex systems to the point where they may be understood are characteristic of disciplines studying middle-number systems. Such techniques are widely used in meteorology, fluid dynamics, organic chemistry, and other fields. The development of this type of technique in ecology has been slow, however, because there are so many axes of variation to choose among .

Or perhaps the field did not yet have a theory developed enough to suggest where to look. Sterner and Elser make a strong case that the place to begin looking is...