Spatio-Temporal Variability of Richness Estimators: Coastal Marine Fish Communities as Examples

We assessed the performance of two estimators of species richness, the Chao2 and the Coleman 'random placement curve'. Using a dataset of intertidal fish from the Norwegian Skagerrak coast, we found that Chao2 was effective for low sampling intensity, often reaching asymptotic values for f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Oecologia 2005-06, Vol.144 (2), p.308-317
Main Authors: Lekve, Kyrre, Ellingsen, Kari E., Lingjærde, Ole Chr, Gjøsæter, Jakob, Stenseth, Nils Chr
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis of Variance
Animal and plant ecology
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Animals
Asymptotes
Biodiversity
Biological and medical sciences
Community Ecology
Demography
Estimation methods
Estimators
Fishes - physiology
Fjords
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
Geography
Intertidal fish
Marine
Marine fish
Marine fishes
Models, Biological
Norway
Performance assessment
Pisces
Principal Component Analysis
Sample Size
Seasons
Spatial models
Species
Species diversity
Species richness
Summer
Time Factors
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Summary:We assessed the performance of two estimators of species richness, the Chao2 and the Coleman 'random placement curve'. Using a dataset of intertidal fish from the Norwegian Skagerrak coast, we found that Chao2 was effective for low sampling intensity, often reaching asymptotic values for few samples, but for higher sampling intensity the performance deteriorated. For large samples, the Coleman random placement curve was more effective than the Chao2 estimates when comparing spatio-temporal patterns of species richness. Spatial patterns were clearly and consistently identified by both methods, whereas the coastal fish communities displayed too much variability in the early summer for any sensible measure of temporal patterns of fish-species richness to be made. To control for spurious results due to systematic differences in mean abundance of the samples the analyses were performed also on data standardised by the number of individuals in the samples, without any significant change in the results. We conclude that modest sampling effort is sufficient to characterise spatial patterns of coastal fish-species richness, while a detailed and high-precision description of seasonal patterns could not be obtained with any reasonable sampling effort.
ISSN:0029-8549
1432-1939
DOI:10.1007/s00442-005-0049-9