A fundamental question in ecology is how many species occur within a given
area. Despite the complexity and diversity of different ecosystems. there e
xists a surprisingly simple, approximate answer: the number of species is p
roportional to the size of the area raised to some exponent. The exponent o
ften turns out to be roughly 1/4. This power law can be derived from assump
tions about the relative abundances of species or from notions of self-simi
larity. Here we analyze the largest existing data set of location-mapped sp
ecies: over one million, individually identified trees from five tropical f
orests on three continents. Although the power law is a reasonable, zeroth-
order approximation of our data, we find consistent deviations from it on a
ll spatial scales. Furthermore, tropical forests are not self-similar at ar
eas less than or equal to 50 hectares. We develop an extended model of the
species-area relationship, which enables us to predict large-scale species
diversity from small-scale data samples more accurately than any other avai
lable method.