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Species richness estimators: how many species can dance on the head of a pin?
Author(s) -
O'HARA R. B.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
journal of animal ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.134
H-Index - 157
eISSN - 1365-2656
pISSN - 0021-8790
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2656.2005.00940.x
Subject(s) - species richness , rarefaction (ecology) , estimator , abundance (ecology) , parametric statistics , mathematics , statistics , parametric model , relative species abundance , distribution (mathematics) , ecology , biology , mathematical analysis
Summary1 Several species richness estimators (two non‐parametric, four based on rarefaction curves and two from fitting of abundance distributions) were compared by examining their performance in estimating the species richness for two moth data sets from the United Kingdom. Comparisons were also made using data simulated from the fitted abundance distributions. 2 The different species richness estimators gave different estimates. The non‐parametric estimates and the rarefaction estimates were similar, but were smaller than the parametric estimates. When the simulated data were used, the only methods to give estimates near the true value was the parametric method using the distribution from which the data were simulated. 3 At present it is impossible to decide whether any of the estimation methods will give a realistic estimate, as not enough is known about the true numbers of species in communities. Until this is rectified, the most that can be hoped for is to obtain upper and lower bounds on species richness.