Estimating species - area relationships by modeling abundance and frequency subject to incomplete sampling.

ABSTRACT: Models and data used to describe species-area relationships confound sampling with ecological process as they fail to acknowledge that estimates of species richness arise due to sampling. This compromises our ability to make ecological inferences from and about species-area relationships. We develop and illustrate hierarchical community models of abundance and frequency to estimate species richness. The models we propose separate sampling from ecological processes by explicitly accounting for the fact that sampled patches are seldom completely covered by sampling plots and that individuals present in the sampling plots are imperfectly detected. We propose a multispecies abundance model in which community assembly is treated as the summation of an ensemble of species-level Poisson processes

SUBMITTER: Yamaura Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4979711 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature