Difficulties in benchmarking ecological null models: an assessment of current methods.

ABSTRACT: Identifying species interactions and detecting when ecological communities are structured by them is an important problem in ecology and biogeography. Ecologists have developed specialized statistical hypothesis tests to detect patterns indicative of community-wide processes in their field data. In this respect, null model approaches have proved particularly popular. The freedom allowed in choosing the null model and statistic to construct a hypothesis test leads to a proliferation of possible hypothesis tests from which ecologists can choose to detect these processes. Here, we point out some serious shortcomings of a popular approach to choosing the best hypothesis for the ecological problem at hand that involves benchmarking different hypothesis tests by assessing their performance on ar

SUBMITTER: Molina C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7078898 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature