A Point-Process Model for Variance-Occupancy-Abundance Relationships

• Published in: The American naturalist 2011-09, Vol.178 (3), p.383-396
• Main Authors: Picard, Nicolas, Favier, Charly
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animal and plant ecology; Animal, plant and microbial ecology; Biological and medical sciences; Datasets; Ecology - methods; Ecosystem; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; General aspects; Grain size; Mathematics; Modeling; Models, Biological; Models, Statistical; Nonnative species; Parametric models; Plant populations; Power laws; Predictive modeling; Rainforests; Spatial models; Species; Trees; Tropical Climate; Tropical rain forests
• ISSN: 0003-0147; 1537-5323
• DOI: 10.1086/661249

The relationship between species abundance, the variance of the number of individuals, and species occupancy is a fundamental ecological characteristic of a community. Moreover, this relationship varies across scales, and any model for the variance-occupancy-abundance (VOA) relationship has to address its scale dependency in a consistent way. In this study, point-process theory was used to define a multiscale model that jointly predicts the VOA relationship across scales in a consistent way. This provides a tool to jointly analyze data sets collected at different scales and to give insights into the biological processes underlying the VOA relationship. This model can also account for different types of individual spatial pattern (clustered, random, or regular). Three stand-mapping data sets of tree species in tropical rain forests were used to assess the relevance of this model. When compared with four existing models, the model based on point-process theory provided the best fit to the data and was the most often ranked as the model with the best predictive performance.