The geometric mean of relative abundance indices : a biodiversity measure with a difference

By S. T. Buckland, Angelika Studeny, Anne E. Magurran, Janine B. Illian, Stuart E. Newson. 2011

101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The 2010 Biodiversity Target of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), set in 2002, which stated that there should be ‘a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss' by 2010, highlighted the need for informative and tractable metrics that can be used to evaluate change in biological diversity. While the subsequent Aichi 2020 targets are more wide-ranging, they also seek to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss. The geometric mean of relative abundance indices, G, is increasingly being used to examine trends in biological diversity and to assess whether biodiversity targets are being met. Here, we explore the mathematical and statistical properties of G that make it useful for judging temporal change in biological diversity, and we discuss its advantages and limitations relative to other measures. We demonstrate that the index reflects trends in both abundance and evenness, and that it is not prone to bias when detectability of individuals varies by species. We note that it allows data from different surveys to be combined to generate a composite index. However, the index exhibits high variance and unstable behaviour when rarely-recorded species are included in the analyses.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fc9dbae486b94b4c01fdb1e786e52d2c8c278d9

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In Ecological Modeling

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

An analysis of trends, uncertainty and species selection shows contrasting trends of widespread forest and farmland birds in Europe (2019, background): “Both indices are based on the geometric mean of the relative abundance of species and 47 several studies have shown this metric to have advantages over traditional indices of biodiversity 48 change (Buckland et al. 2011; van Strien, Soldaat & Gregory 2012; Santini et al. 2016).”
Impacts of nitrogen addition on plant species richness and abundance: A global meta‐analysis (2018, methodology): “…(GMA) Mean of log‐transformed response ratios of mean individual abundance. n is the number of species in each observation GMA=exp � ∑ [ln � ̄AT � −ln � ̄AC � ] n � Number of replicates Buckland et al. (2011) Schipper et al. (2016) Santini et al. (2017) aBefore log‐transformation, the ratio…”
Small mammals decline with increasing fire extent in northern Australia: evidence from long-term monitoring in Kakadu National Park (2015, unknown): “GMA was useful as a response variable because it integrates both species richness and abundance (Buckland et al. 2011), and is sensitive to trends in the abundance of a group of species as a whole (e.”
Assessing the suitability of diversity metrics to detect biodiversity change (2017, background): “The geometric mean abundance tends to be more sensitive to changes in abundances of rare species than the arithmetic mean, and acts as a composite measure of evenness and abundance (Buckland et al., 2011; Gregory and van Strien, 2010; Gregory et al., 2005; Schipper et al., 2016; van Strien et al., 2”