Ethan P. White | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2015

Elevating the status of code in ecology

Introduction Introduction The role of code... Current standards for code... Promoting code in ecology... References Code is increasingly central to research in ecology. From running statistical analyses for field and lab projects to developing software intended to be used broadly for modeling and data analysis, most ecologists now commonly write code as part of their research. It is important that the communication of research results addresses the fact that code is now a key component of most ecological studies.\n\nThe role of code in ecological research Introduction The role of code... Current standards for code... Promoting code in ecology... References The transition to a greate ...

Ecology↗

bioRxiv2015

An extensive comparison of species-abundance distribution models.

A number of different models have been proposed as descriptions of the species-abundance distribution (SAD). Most evaluations of these models use only one or two models, focus only a single ecosystem or taxonomic group, or fail to use appropriate statistical methods. We use likelihood and AIC to compare the fit of four of the most widely used models to data on over 16,000 communities from a diverse array of taxonomic groups and ecosystems. Across all datasets combined the log-series, Poisson lognormal, and negative binomial all yield similar overall fits to the data. Therefore, when correcting for differences in the number of parameters the log-series generally provides the best fit to data. Within individual datasets some other distributions performed nearly as well as the log-series even after correcting for the number of parameters. The Zipf distribution is generally a poor characterization of the SAD.

Preprint↗