The fractal dimension of the tree of life
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Abstract
The structure pattern of the tree of life clues on the key ecological issues; hence knowing the fractal dimension is the fundamental question in understanding the tree of life. Yet the fractal dimension of the tree of life remains unclear since the scale of the tree of life has hypergrown in recent years. Here we show that the tree of life display a consistent power-law rules for inter- and intra-taxonomic levels, but the fractal dimensions were different among different kingdoms. The fractal dimension of hierarchical structure (Dr) is 0.873 for the entire tree of life, which smaller than the values of Dr for Animalia and Plantae but greater than the values of Dr for Fungi, Chromista, and Protozoa. The hierarchical fractal dimensions values for prokaryotic kingdoms are lower than for other kingdoms. The Dr value for Viruses was lower than most eukaryotic kingdoms, but greater than prokaryotes. The distribution of taxa size is governed by fractal diversity but skewed by overdominating taxa with large subtaxa size. The proportion of subtaxa in taxa with small and large sizes was greater than in taxa with intermediate size. Our results suggest that the distribution of subtaxa in taxa can be predicted with fractal dimension for the accumulating taxa abundance rather than the taxa abundance. Our study determined the fractal dimensions for inter- and intra-taxonomic levels of the present tree of life. These results emphases the need for further theoretical studies, as well as predictive modelling, to interpret the different fractal dimension for different taxonomic groups and skewness of taxa with large subtaxa size.
Cite this as
2014. The fractal dimension of the tree of life. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e198v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.198v3Author comment
In this version we have modified the authors because Dr. Jun Gong's contribution was implamented by Dr. Yuping Wu. Furthermore, we edited the language problems.
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Competing Interests
We declare no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Xiaofei Lv conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Yuping Wu conceived and designed the experiments, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Bin Ma conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Funding
This investigation was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (41301333) and Open Research Fund Program of MOIDAT (201318). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
