The speed with which an organism consumes energy is known as the metabolic rate. It is important because it dictates the speed of energy flows through ecosystems. Often, the total energy of an ecosystem is concentrated (in the form of living matter) in relatively few organisms, such as plants and insects. Thus, it is important to know what determines the metabolic rate of these organisms.
Our objectives were to develop a method that would be appropriate for long-term ecological studies, but that would permit rapid surveys to evaluate biotic complementarity and land-use planning in Amazonia. The Amazon basin covers about 7 million km2 . Therefore, even a sparse coverage, with one sample site per 10.000 km2 , would require about 700 sampling sites.
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