Publication Details
Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.1002/ece3.7093
Licence creative commons licence
Title (Primary) Patterns of richness across forest beetle communities—A methodological comparison of observed and estimated species numbers
Author Haack, N.; Grimm-Seyfarth, A.; Schlegel, M.; Wirth, C.; Bernhard, D.; Brunk, I.; Henle, K.
Journal Ecology and Evolution
Year 2021
Department NSF; iDiv
Volume 11
Issue 1
Page From 626
Page To 635
Language englisch
Topic T5 Future Landscapes
Data links https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.d7wm37q0g
Keywords alpha diversity; Coleoptera; community patterns; floodplain forest; number of shared species; observed species number; species richness estimators
Abstract
  1. Species richness is a frequently used measure of biodiversity. The compilation of a complete species list is an often unattainable goal. Estimators of species richness have been developed to overcome this problem. While the use of these estimators is becoming increasingly popular, working with the observed number of species is still common practice.
  2. To assess whether patterns of beetle communities based on observed numbers may be compared among each other, we compared patterns from observed and estimated numbers of species for beetle communities in the canopy of the Leipzig floodplain forest. These patterns were species richness and the number of shared species among three tree species and two canopy strata.
  3. We tested the applicability of the asymptotic Chao1 estimator and the estimate provided by the nonasymptotic rarefaction–extrapolation method for all tree species and both upper canopy and lower canopy. In the majority of cases, the ranking patterns of species richness for host tree species and strata were the same for the observed and estimated number of species. The ranking patterns of the number of species shared among host tree species and strata, however, were significantly different between observed and estimated values.
  4. Our results indicate that the observed number of species under‐represents species richness and the number of shared species. However, ranking comparisons of published patterns based on the number of observed species may be acceptable for species richness but likely not reliable for the number of shared species. Further studies are needed to corroborate this conclusion. We encourage to use estimators and to provide open access to data to allow comparative assessments.
Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=24081
Haack, N., Grimm-Seyfarth, A., Schlegel, M., Wirth, C., Bernhard, D., Brunk, I., Henle, K. (2021):
Patterns of richness across forest beetle communities—A methodological comparison of observed and estimated species numbers
Ecol. Evol. 11 (1), 626 - 635