The Hierarchical Structuring of Species Abundances within Communities: Disentangling the Intensity of the Underlying Structuring Process behind the Apparent Unevenness Pattern
Advances in Research · pp. 1–12 · Published 9 Aug 2018
10.9734/AIR/2018/43421Abstract
Besides species richness, the hierarchical structuration of species abundances is the second major characteristic that numerically specifies a community of species. However, while the meaning of species richness is simple and straightforward, the hierarchical structuration of abundances is a less simple concept, where the pattern – i.e. the straightforwardly observed level of unevenness of species abundance distribution – does not reliably mirror the genuine intensity of the structuring process itself. This is because the level of unevenness is also mathematically dependent upon species richness. Accordingly, when specifying numerically a community of species, I advocate not to be satisfied, as usual, by considering only the total species richness and the degree of unevenness (whatever the expression chosen to quantify unevenness). A third parameter should be further considered: the genuine intensity of the structuring process itself, defined freed from the purely mathematical influence of species richness and, thereby, accurately reflecting the functional contribution to the hierarchical structuration of species abundances. The level of unevenness is thus only granted a simply descriptive goal, while the intensity of the structuring process relevantly speaks for the biological background behind the apparent hierarchical structuration of species abundances in communities. An additional requirement to warrant the reliable evaluations of these three parameters is, of course, to work with (sub-) exhaustive samplings of the studied communities or, when not possible in practice, to consider the least-biased numerical extrapolations of partial samplings (when only the latter are available). The benefits of this renewed methodological way to quantify the internal organization of species communities, as well as the potential pitfalls to which one may be exposed by considering only species richness and (apparent) abundance unevenness, are argued from a theoretical point of view and then highlighted concretely in a series of examples.
References (6)
- 1 Theoretical Derivation of a Bias-reduced Expression for the Extrapolation of the Species Accumulation Curve and the Associated Estimation of Total Species Richness [DOI]
- 2 How to Extrapolate Species Abundance Distributions with Minimum Bias When Dealing with Incomplete Species Inventories [DOI]
- 3 Numerical Extrapolation of the Species Abundance Distribution Unveils the True Species Richness and the Hierarchical Structuring of a Partially Sampled Marine Gastropod Community in the Andaman Islands (India) [DOI]
- 4 Extrapolation of the Species Accumulation Curve Associated to “Chao” Estimator of the Number of Unrecorded Species: A Mathematically Consistent Derivation [DOI]
- 5 Estimating True Species Richness and the Degree of Hierarchical Structuring of Species Abundances in Eight Frog Communities from the North-Western Ghats of India [DOI]
- 6 On the variability of Species Abundance Distributions with trophic guild and community structure [DOI]
Cited by 16
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Showing 14 of 16 known citations — external sources report more than can currently be individually listed.
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