Difficulties in summing log-normal distributions for abundance and potential solutions.

ABSTRACT: The log-normal distribution, often used to model animal abundance and its uncertainty, is central to ecological modeling and conservation but its statistical properties are less intuitive than those of the normal distribution. The right skew of the log-normal distribution can be considerable for highly uncertain estimates and the median is often chosen as a point estimate. However, the use of the median can become complicated when summing across populations since the median of the sum of log-normal distributions is not the sum of the constituent medians. Such estimates become sensitive to the spatial or taxonomic scale over which abundance is being summarized and the naive estimate (the median of the distribution representing the sum across populations) can become grossly inflated. Here we

SUBMITTER: Talis EJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9836268 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature