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A relationship between species richness and evenness that depends on specific relative abundance distribution

Although many ecologists focus on the relationship between species richness (S) and evenness (E), conflicts between observation and theory are difficult to reconcile. Empirical S–E relationships were not consistent, while relationships show strong correlation between S and E. Since E essentially dep...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Su, Qiang
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6003394/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29910980
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4951
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author Su, Qiang
author_facet Su, Qiang
author_sort Su, Qiang
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description Although many ecologists focus on the relationship between species richness (S) and evenness (E), conflicts between observation and theory are difficult to reconcile. Empirical S–E relationships were not consistent, while relationships show strong correlation between S and E. Since E essentially depended on the relative abundance distribution (RAD), the hypothesis of this paper was that the S–E relationship should be determined by RAD. Theoretical S–E relationships for various RADs have already been reported, but they were rarely assessed by the raw data. This study constructed S–E relationships for a specific RAD, which indicated that if the community had a fractal distribution of rank abundance, E would decrease with S, and the S–E relationship would be unique for a given RAD. Such theoretical expectations were supported by three datasets with 82 samples, which suggested that the S–E relationship were controlled by RAD and inconsistent S–E relationships in statistical analyses could be accounted for by the variation of underlying RAD model between communities. From the perspective of RAD, it could be too early to split the diversity into S and E only based on the S–E relationship in statistical analyses.
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spelling pubmed-60033942018-06-15 A relationship between species richness and evenness that depends on specific relative abundance distribution Su, Qiang PeerJ Biodiversity Although many ecologists focus on the relationship between species richness (S) and evenness (E), conflicts between observation and theory are difficult to reconcile. Empirical S–E relationships were not consistent, while relationships show strong correlation between S and E. Since E essentially depended on the relative abundance distribution (RAD), the hypothesis of this paper was that the S–E relationship should be determined by RAD. Theoretical S–E relationships for various RADs have already been reported, but they were rarely assessed by the raw data. This study constructed S–E relationships for a specific RAD, which indicated that if the community had a fractal distribution of rank abundance, E would decrease with S, and the S–E relationship would be unique for a given RAD. Such theoretical expectations were supported by three datasets with 82 samples, which suggested that the S–E relationship were controlled by RAD and inconsistent S–E relationships in statistical analyses could be accounted for by the variation of underlying RAD model between communities. From the perspective of RAD, it could be too early to split the diversity into S and E only based on the S–E relationship in statistical analyses. PeerJ Inc. 2018-06-12 /pmc/articles/PMC6003394/ /pubmed/29910980 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4951 Text en ©2018 Su http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Biodiversity
Su, Qiang
A relationship between species richness and evenness that depends on specific relative abundance distribution
title A relationship between species richness and evenness that depends on specific relative abundance distribution
title_full A relationship between species richness and evenness that depends on specific relative abundance distribution
title_fullStr A relationship between species richness and evenness that depends on specific relative abundance distribution
title_full_unstemmed A relationship between species richness and evenness that depends on specific relative abundance distribution
title_short A relationship between species richness and evenness that depends on specific relative abundance distribution
title_sort relationship between species richness and evenness that depends on specific relative abundance distribution
topic Biodiversity
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6003394/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29910980
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4951
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