A hidden species-area curve

作者：Chu Clara; Smith Woollcott^*; Solow Andrew

来源：Environmental and Ecological Statistics, 2014, 21(1): 113-124.

DOI：10.1007/s10651-013-0247-2

• Benthic invertebrates
• False absence
• Finite mixture models
• Spatial sampling

The species-area curve, which describes the relationship between the number of observed species in a geographical region and the area of the region, plays a central role in biogeography. Beyond its scientific importance, the species-area curve is commonly used to assess the loss of species due to habitat loss. When the species-area curve is estimated from spatial samples, the existence of species with low or highly spatially variable abundance exaggerates the true rate at which species accumulate with area. Here, a hidden species-area curve is defined that accounts for this sampling effect and its estimation by maximum likelihood is outlined. Both the species-area curve and the hidden species-area curve are conditioned on the observed species list; thus the analysis does not depend on the total number of observed and unobserved species, that is, species richness. The method is tested by sub-sampling some tropical forest data and found to work well. It is also applied to a classic data set from the deep sea. For these data, accounting for this sampling effect has a large impact.

• 出版日期2014-3