Diversity and richness analysis
9 important questions on Diversity and richness analysis
What is species richness?
- Counting species’ presence (not abundance)
- Often used concept
- Specific goal for conservation activities: max Nspp
- How to compare among sites?
Does an uneven sampling & exhaustive list allow for a comparison between number of species?
What are the baises/problems with rarefaction?
- Assumes species occur randomly in each sample (but species occur clustered in samples)
- Cannot take into account the distribution of relative abundances in the whole, larger community (because unknown).
- Cannot extrapolate -> how many species are there in total?
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What are the pitfalls of using ratios (S/N)?
- Richness does not increase linearly with sample size
- Information about the number of species alone is “meaningless”
What is the solution to tackling pitfalls?
What is the Chao index?
- relative abundance is important
What is species evenness (equitability)?
What is the Shannon-Wiener H?
- H’ higher -> more diverse enables relative comparison among samples
- Often used
- Difficult value; Not: number of species
- Highly sensitive to sample size & standarization……so…..
What is the Hill-Simpson index?
- evenness/dominance
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