Estimating diversity in networked ecological communities.

ABSTRACT: Comparing ecological communities across environmental gradients can be challenging, especially when the number of different taxonomic groups in the communities is large. In this setting, community-level summaries called diversity indices are widely used to detect changes in the community ecology. However, estimation of diversity indices has received relatively little attention from the statistical community. The most common estimates of diversity are the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters of a multinomial model, even though the multinomial model implies strict assumptions about the sampling mechanism. In particular, the multinomial model prohibits ecological networks, where taxa positively and negatively co-occur. In this article, we leverage models from the compositional data

SUBMITTER: Willis AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8759443 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature