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Why do species abundance distributions of individuals and of biomass behave differently under sampling?
Author(s) -
Williamson Mark
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
oikos
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.672
H-Index - 179
eISSN - 1600-0706
pISSN - 0030-1299
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0706.2010.18643.x
Subject(s) - biomass (ecology) , sampling (signal processing) , abundance (ecology) , taxon , ecology , biology , physics , detector , optics
A surprising and important difference between species abundance distributions (SADs) of individuals and of biomass has been found in a wide variety of taxa. On sampling, individuals SADs are ‘veiled’, the left tail is missing, to an extent depending on the sampling intensity, while biomass SADs appear not to be veiled. The explanation offered here is that sampling is always of individuals, biomass is sampled only indirectly. Graphs of the community of birds in an English wood show how the explanation works. Biomass SADs are different from individuals SADs.