A shift in the biodiversity fitness of meta-communities assessed from space

Land surface temperature obtained from remote sensing is a measure of the Earth’s entropy production hypothesizing that the planet’s absorption and emission budget is governed by the Stefan-Boltzmann law for black body radiation. Based on Penrose’s claim, explaining life as the decelerating force of entropy produced at Earth, changing entropy production over time is an indication of shifting forest biodiversity.

In earlier research we have analysed Earth’s entropy production in four regions comprising a subarctic forest in Finland, a deciduous forest in Belgium, a Mediterranean forest in Spain, and a rainforest in Congo. Within the period 2003-2018, the deciduous forest was undergoing a dramatic decay of biodiversity by 5%, the rainforest by 2% while the biodiversity of the subarctic and Mediterranean forest remained pretty stable (Verstraeten & Verstraeten, EGU 2023). The entropy production shift was connected to the Shannon entropy of the lognormal distribution of species amount as claimed by Hubbel in his Unified Neutral Theory of Individual Migration of Life (Hubbel, 2001). The latent heat production, however, was not included in the earth surface energy budget.

Here we refine our results by focusing on the deciduous forest as pilot ecosystem for applying the Hubbel’s Unified Theory between three interacting communities in Flanders, Belgium. In this study we have included the Sonian forest (south of Brussels), Meerdal forest (east of Brussels) and the Houwaart area (north-east of Brussels). During the period 2003-2018 the refined local entropy changes by including monthly rainfall data of Sonian and Meerdal forest increased substantially (1.7-1.9%/decade), while the entropy change of the Houwaart area remains stable (0.5%/decade).

In addition, we have analysed the shift in biodiversity of the Meerdal forest by considering the Sonian forest and Houwaart area as its meta-community using the method of Hubbel. The Meerdal and Houwaart forests follow Preston’s lognormal distributions of species, while the Sonian forest follows the Fisher’s lognormal distribution due to the mono dominant biodiversity. The shift of the total number of species of the central community follows from the Arrhenius species area power law that connects the total number of species in the central community by its biodiversity number.