The lognormal distribution is not an appropriate null hypothesis for the species–abundance distribution

By M. Williamson, Kevin J. Gaston. 2005

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa7a2f44d487a2996920f958b5b2e81b32e6414f

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In Ecological Modeling

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In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

The gambin model provides a superior fit to species abundance distributions with a single free parameter: evidence, implementation and interpretation (2014, background): “2010; but see White et al. 2012), and the use of the PLN has been criticised, both in general terms (Williamson and Gaston 2005), and particularly in comparative analysis, as the parameters are not as intuitively interpretable as those of the logseries (but see Engen 2001, Sæther et al. 2013).”
Biodiversity and extinction: the importance of being common (2008, background): “…the upper tails of these frequency distributions have often proven particularly diffi cult to predict, in part because they comprise so few species and in part because in some models the upper limit to abundance is effectively unbounded which is obviously unrealistic (Williamson and Gaston, 2005).”
Drivers of β‐diversity along latitudinal gradients revisited (2013, background): “Global Ecology and Biogeography, 22, 659–670, © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd666 The number of individuals of each of multiple species in a site or community produces a species abundance distribution (Williamson & Gaston, 2005).”
The Logarithmic Skew-Normal Distributions are Moment-Indeterminate (2009, background): “Besides Chai and Bailey’s (2008) paper cited in the introduction, other relevant references include Azzalini et al. (2003), Williamson and Gaston (2005), and Yamazaki and Lueck (1990).”
Which function describes the species–area relationship best? A review and empirical evaluation (2009, background): “Moreover, various authors have shown that lognormal species-abundance distributions are much rarer in nature than are power-law SARs (e.g. Williamson & Gaston, 2005).”
How many birds are there in a city of half a million people? (2009, background): “This strongly bimodal pattern differs markedly from the more obviously unimodal and closer to (albeit not actually) log-normal species-abundance distribution of UK farmland birds and British birds as a whole (Preston, 1948; Gregory, 1994; Williamson & Gaston, 2005).”
Mechanisms in macroecology: AWOL or purloined letter? Towards a pragmatic view of mechanism (2010, background): “Yet Pielou (1975) and later authors (Williamson and Gaston 2005, Alonso et al. 2008) state that this is an incorrect interpretation since the growth rates of diff erent species are not sampled from the same distribution.”
To Fit or Not to Fit? A Poorly Fitting Procedure Produces Inconsistent Results When the Species–Area Relationship is used to Locate Hotspots (2007, background): “Although the lognormal distribution was one of the most favoured model for species abundances, Williamson and Gaston (2005) have shown that both plant and animal communities deviate substantially from this distribution and that there is no theoretical justification for it.”
Vegan: ecological diversity (2016, unknown): “times (Williamson and Gaston, 2005).”
Species abundance distributions: moving beyond single prediction theories to integration within an ecological framework. (2007, methodology): “This symmetry has also been controversial in the derivation of the lognormal using the central limit theorem (CLT; May 1975; Pielou 1977; Ugland & Gray 1982; McGill 2003a; Williamson & Gaston 2005).”
Estimating the Number of Species in Microbial Diversity Studies (2014, background): “Various distributions have been proposed on this basis, such as the log-normal distribution, but countervailing arguments were quickly produced (Williamson & Gaston 2005).”
Idiosyncrasy and overdominance in the structure of natural communities of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi: is there a role for stochastic processes? (2010, methodology): “However, the lognormal is a purely statistical model and both biological and statistical mechanisms have been proposed to explain this distribution (Williamson & Gaston 2005).”