Back

Measuring plant diversity in a two-stage sampling design by Bayesian updated relative abundances

Damgaard, C.; Pedersen, M. H.; Bendsen, N. B.; Mikkelsen, D. L.; Ehlers, B. K.; Bataillon, T.

2022-03-23 ecology
10.1101/2022.03.23.485475 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The two-stage sampling design provides good local estimates of both the number of plant species and the relative abundances. However, it is a problem to calculate Hill diversity indices at the local scale, because some of the species found in the large plot are not present in the small plot and such species should then incorrectly be weighted with zero relative abundance. A new method for calculating local Hill diversity indices from species richness and relative abundances data is therefore needed. We suggest to replace the local relative abundances with Bayesian updated relative abundance estimates, where the prior probability distribution of the relative abundances are empirically estimated from all plots of the same habitat types. The method is applied on Danish Nardus grasslands.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.