The DOI matches its Crossref record; 77 of the 77 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Why Are Parts of the World Green? Multiple Factors Control Productivity and the Distribution of Biomass
Abstract
This paper evaluates the multiple factors that determine the production of plant biomass and its distribution among producers and various trophic groups of con_ ?^)^ Osumers. In rough order of their importance, water and nutrient availability, factors 0*S that deter herbivores (plant defenses, environmental heterogeneity and disturbance, nutrient stoichiometry), and consumption by herbivores appear to be the most universal determinants of the production and distribution of plant biomass. In some times and places, indirect effects from enemies of herbivores (predators, parasites, parasitoids and pathogens) propagate through the food web to influence plant biomass, in a manner somewhat consistent with green world and exploitation ecosystem mechanisms. I discuss why such food web dynamics appear to be much more important in water than on land. The only demonstrated cases of communitylevel trophic cascades occur in water. Although species-level cascades are moderately frequent on land, community-level cascades rarely or never occur.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
HUMAN ALTERATION OF THE GLOBAL NITROGEN CYCLE: SOURCES AND CONSEQUENCES
Vitousek, P. M., Aber, J. D., Howarth, R. W., Likens, G. E., Matson, P. A., Schindler, D. W., Schlesinger, W. H., & Tilman, D. G. (1997) · Ecological Applications · doi:10.1890/1051-0761(1997)007[0737:haotgn]2.0.co;2 · Cited by 5,390
Resource Availability and Plant Antiherbivore Defense
Coley, P. D., Bryant, J. P., & Chapin, F. S. (1985) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.230.4728.895 · Cited by 3,967
Community structure, population control, and competition.
Hairston, N. G., Smith, F. E., & Slobodkin, L. B. (1960) · The American Naturalist · doi:10.1086/282146 · Cited by 3,492
The distribution and abundance of animals
Andrewartha, H. G., & Birch, L. C. (1974) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 2,774
Clymo, R. S., & Whittaker, R. H. (1970) · The Journal of Ecology · doi:10.2307/2258550 · Cited by 2,436
The Ecology And Evolution Of Intraguild Predation: Potential Competitors That Eat Each Other
Polis, G. A., Myers, C. A., & Holt, R. D. (1989) · Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics · doi:10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.20.1.297 · Cited by 2,229
Self-citationFood Web Complexity and Community Dynamics
Polis, G. A., & Strong, D. R. (1996) · The American Naturalist · doi:10.1086/285880 · Cited by 2,109
Self-citation(2012) · SpringerReference · doi:10.1007/springerreference_76825 · Cited by 2,069
Challenges in the Quest for Keystones
Power, M. E., Tilman, D., Estes, J. A., Menge, B. A., Bond, W. J., Mills, L. S., Daily, G., Castilla, J. C., Lubchenco, J., & Paine, R. T. (1996) · BioScience · doi:10.2307/1312990 · Cited by 2,018
Cited by
Fire as a global ‘herbivore’: the ecology and evolution of flammable ecosystems
BOND, W., & KEELEY, J. (2005) · Trends in Ecology & Evolution · doi:10.1016/j.tree.2005.04.025 · Cited by 2,484
The global distribution of ecosystems in a world without fire
Bond, W. J., Woodward, F. I., & Midgley, G. F. (2005) · New Phytologist · doi:10.1111/j.1469-8137.2004.01252.x · Cited by 1,942
Ecological Meltdown in Predator-Free Forest Fragments
Terborgh, J., Lopez, L., Nuñez, P., Rao, M., Shahabuddin, G., Orihuela, G., Riveros, M., Ascanio, R., Adler, G. H., Lambert, T. D., et al. (2001) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1064397 · Cited by 1,656
Tangled webs: reciprocal flows of invertebrate prey link streams and riparian zones
BAXTER, C. V., FAUSCH, K. D., & CARL SAUNDERS, W. (2005) · Freshwater Biology · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2427.2004.01328.x · Cited by 1,204
Trophic cascades: the primacy of trait‐mediated indirect interactions
Schmitz, O. J., Krivan, V., & Ovadia, O. (2004) · Ecology Letters · doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2003.00560.x · Cited by 1,081
Metadata
- Authors
- Polis, G. A.
- Venue
- Oikos
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1999-07
- Volume
- 86
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 3
- ISSN
- 0030-1299 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2334256381
- Cited by
- 578
- References
- 77
- FWCI
- 22.65
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Why Are Parts of the World Green? Multiple Factors Control Productivity and the Distribution of Biomass. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/3546565
- The paper
- Polis, G. A. (1999). Why Are Parts of the World Green? Multiple Factors Control Productivity and the Distribution of Biomass. Oikos. https://doi.org/10.2307/3546565
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.