Positive Interspecific Relationship between Temporal Occurrence and Abundance in Insects

One of the most studied macroecological patterns is the interspecific abundance–occupancy relationship, which relates species distribution and abundance across space. Interspecific relationships between temporal distribution and abundance, however, remain largely unexplored. Using data for a natural assemblage of tabanid flies measured daily during spring and summer in Nova Scotia, we found that temporal occurrence (proportion of sampling dates in which a species occurred in an experimental trap) was positively related to temporal mean abundance (number of individuals collected for a species during the study period divided by the total number of sampling dates). Moreover, two models that often describe spatial abundance–occupancy relationships well, the He–Gaston and negative binomial models, explained a high amount of the variation in our temporal data. As for the spatial abundance–occupancy relationship, the (temporal) aggregation parameter, k, emerged as an important component of the hereby named interspecific temporal abundance–occurrence relationship. This may be another case in which a macroecological pattern shows similarities across space and time, and it deserves further research because it may improve our ability to forecast colonization dynamics and biological impacts.