PARENT SESSION
Oral Session 18: Ecological Theory I: Modeling.
Presiding: R Zabel
Monday, August 2, 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, Meeting Room F 152.

The logistic-J curve: A new species-abundance distribution and its supporting metastudy.

Dewdney, Alexander¹, ¹ University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT- A recently published metastudy involving 125 randomly selected biocoenoses appears to establish the logistic-J distribution as the theoretical pattern underlying species abundance distributions in natural communities, worldwide. Extensive chi square tests of the metastudy, as well as a new general theory of sampling, have ruled out the log-series and lognormal distributions as having any role to play in this regard. Other proposals for the underlying pattern, such as the broken-stick distribution and the negative binomial distribution can now also be rejected by comparing their predictions to empirical data from the metastudy. A long-standing problem in theoretical ecology, the near-endless proliferation of models, has resulted from a misunderstanding of the nature of statistical variation in this context.

Key words: distributions, metastudy, species-abundance, logistic-J