Response to Comments on "From Plant Traits to Plant Communities: A Statistical Mechanistic Approach to Biodiversity"
Résumé
We maintain that there is no circularity or structural bias in our model that inflates its predictive ability beyond the sampling bias inherent in the r 2 statistic. When replacing observed average traits by environmental variables, the generality and predictive ability depends on one's empirical ability to predict these average values. Finally, maximizing rather than minimizing entropy given constraints is justified by axioms of information theory and is not an ecological assumption.