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TESTING FOR CHANGES IN COMMUNITY STRUCTURE BASED ON REPEATED SAMPLING
Author(s) -
Diserud Ola H.,
Aagaard Kaare
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.144
H-Index - 294
eISSN - 1939-9170
pISSN - 0012-9658
DOI - 10.1890/0012-9658(2002)083[2271:tfcics]2.0.co;2
Subject(s) - sampling (signal processing) , community structure , abundance (ecology) , ecology , randomness , environmental science , flooding (psychology) , sampling design , statistics , biology , computer science , mathematics , psychology , filter (signal processing) , psychotherapist , computer vision , population , demography , sociology
When comparing samples to evaluate changes in community structure, there are several uncertainties that must be taken into consideration. Sampling inevitably induces randomness in observed species composition and abundance. Even if they come from exactly the same community, two samples may show considerable differences. If the sampling effort varies, differences will increase even more. Finally, when time has elapsed between samples, we would like to correct for variations in true species abundance occurring naturally due to fluctuating environmental conditions. In this paper we develop a test method that corrects for sampling in general, as well as for differential sampling efforts. The species abundances are also allowed to vary in time, enabling us to test for additional changes in community structure due to some extraordinary event. The method will be useful when analyzing consequences of human‐induced disturbances, such as pollution, but also natural catastrophes, such as fire, flooding, extreme weather, or arrival of new species. Here, our method will be applied to a pair of samples from an insect community. We found that the result was affected by the way we chose to measure the community structure, and that the conclusion depended heavily on the estimate of the environmental variation.