Which models are appropriate for six subtropical forests: species-area and species-abundance models

PLoS One. 2014 Apr 22;9(4):e95890. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095890. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

The species-area relationship is one of the most important topic in the study of species diversity, conservation biology and landscape ecology. The species-area relationship curves describe the increase of species number with increasing area, and have been modeled by various equations. In this paper, we used detailed data from six 1-ha subtropical forest communities to fit three species-area relationship models. The coefficient of determination and F ratio of ANOVA showed all the three models fitted well to the species-area relationship data in the subtropical communities, with the logarithm model performing better than the other two models. We also used the three species-abundance distributions, namely the lognormal, logcauchy and logseries model, to fit them to the species-abundance data of six communities. In this case, the logcauchy model had the better fit based on the coefficient of determination. Our research reveals that the rare species always exist in the six communities, corroborating the neutral theory of Hubbell. Furthermore, we explained why all species-abundance figures appeared to be left-side truncated. This was due to subtropical forests have high diversity, and their large species number includes many rare species.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Analysis of Variance
  • Biodiversity*
  • China
  • Climate
  • Forests*
  • Models, Biological*
  • Models, Statistical
  • Plant Dispersal
  • Trees

Grants and funding

The authors thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC grant no.31200412,31200326), and the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-EW-Z), the Project of Scientific Research and Technological Development of Guilin(20130105-8). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.