A generalized approach to the modeling of the species-area relationship

Katiane Silva Conceição; Werner Ulrich; Carlos Alberto Ribeiro Diniz; Francisco Aparecido Rodrigues; Marinho Gomes de Andrade

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0105132

A generalized approach to the modeling of the species-area relationship

PLoS One. 2014 Aug 29;9(8):e105132. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0105132. eCollection 2014.

Authors

Katiane Silva Conceição¹, Werner Ulrich², Carlos Alberto Ribeiro Diniz³, Francisco Aparecido Rodrigues¹, Marinho Gomes de Andrade¹

Affiliations

¹ Departamento de Matemática Aplicada e Estatística, Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação, Universidade de São Paulo, São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil.
² Department of Animal Ecology, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Toruń, Poland.
³ Department of Statistics, Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil.

Abstract

This paper proposes a statistical generalized species-area model (GSAM) to represent various patterns of species-area relationship (SAR), which is one of the fundamental patterns in ecology. The approach enables the generalization of many preliminary models, as power-curve model, which is commonly used to mathematically describe the SAR. The GSAM is applied to simulated data set of species diversity in areas of different sizes and a real-world data of insects of Hymenoptera order has been modeled. We show that the GSAM enables the identification of the best statistical model and estimates the number of species according to the area.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Algorithms
Animals
Computer Simulation*
Ecology*
Hymenoptera* / physiology
Models, Biological*
Models, Statistical*
Population Density

Grants and funding

K. S. Conceição would like to acknowledge FAPESP (grant # 2008/10613-1). F. A. Rodrigues would like to thank CNPq (grant # 305940/2010-4), Fapesp (grant # 2013/26416-9) and NAP eScience - PRP - USP for financial support. The authors also thank Fapesp (grant #2014/15860-8) for funding the publication of this paper. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.