Can remotely-sensed Earth’s entropy production reveal its ecological fitness?

It is straightforward to analyse Earth´s fitness in terms of controlling and governing global warming due to human emissions of greenhouse gasses. We make room, however, for Earth´s entropy production as criterion for ecosystems. Indeed, it is a remarkable claim of Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose to explain life as the decelerating force of earth´s production of entropy. The amount of earth´s entropy production is included in the quantity of emitted energy in the form of long wave or thermal radiation governed by the Stefan-Boltzmann law about the radiance of black bodies. Here we want to analyse how biodiversity is a substantial parameter to explain the decline of the Earth´s entropy production.

In the field of biodiversity Stephan Hubbel formulated the Unified Neutral Theory of Individual Migration of Life as an alternative to the widely accepted niche competition of species theory. According to Hubbel, species abundance is lognormally distributed within an ecosystem after dynamical equilibrium is reached. We examine the drift shift of species within neighbouring ecosystems by analysing the day (DLSTG) and night land surface temperature (NLSTG) gradient.  By restricting the examined area to a honeycomb with cells of 1 km² the assumption of constant atmospheric pressure can be assumed and in consequence the enthalpy is reduced to the entropy variation. The latter can be derived from remotely-sensed mean day and night land surface temperatures (LST).

By interpreting the entropy variation in terms of the statistical Shannon entropy formula wherein we import the lognormal distribution of species abundance, the entropy variation in the studied time interval is proportional to the difference of the natural logarithm of the respective standard deviations of the former and the latter species distribution function. Increased (decreased) entropy corresponds to a negative (positive) rate of biodiversity of the study area.

Hubbel´s area meta-community dynamics and the entropy production of the area under consideration and its surroundings provide a diversity number within the area. By integrating the mosaic of ecosystems over an extended almost isolated area (peninsula, insula, subcontinent) the decline or increase of entropy production gives a substantial support for Earth´s fitness for biological life. Preliminary, we aim at applying MODIS 1 km² day and night LST data on the area of South-western Finland to explore the idea of entropy variations.