An extensive comparison of species-abundance distribution models

PeerJ

article

Elita Baldridge¹  David J. Harris³  Xiao Xiao¹  Ethan P. White¹ 

[1] Department of Biology, Utah State University;Ecology Center, Utah State University;Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida;School of Biology and Ecology, University of Maine;Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, University of Maine;Informatics Institute, University of Florida

关键词: Species-abundance distribution;    Informatics;    Commonness;    Rarity;    Citizen science;    Animals;    Plants;    Community structure;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.2823

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

A number of different models have been proposed as descriptions of the species-abundance distribution (SAD). Most evaluations of these models use only one or two models, focus on only a single ecosystem or taxonomic group, or fail to use appropriate statistical methods. We use likelihood and AIC to compare the fit of four of the most widely used models to data on over 16,000 communities from a diverse array of taxonomic groups and ecosystems. Across all datasets combined the log-series, Poisson lognormal, and negative binomial all yield similar overall fits to the data. Therefore, when correcting for differences in the number of parameters the log-series generally provides the best fit to data. Within individual datasets some other distributions performed nearly as well as the log-series even after correcting for the number of parameters. The Zipf distribution is generally a poor characterization of the SAD.

【 授权许可】

CC BY