Related papers: Sample Size for Concurrent Species Detection in a …
Joint species distribution models are popular in ecology for modeling covariate effects on species occurrence, while characterizing cross-species dependence. Data consist of multivariate binary indicators of the occurrences of different…
Using a sample from a population to estimate the proportion of the population with a certain category label is a broadly important problem. In the context of microbiome studies, this problem arises when researchers wish to use a sample from…
Over the last few decades, ecologists have come to appreciate that key ecological patterns, which describe ecological communities at relatively large spatial scales, are not only scale dependent, but also intimately intertwined. The…
The statistical problem of using an initial sample to estimate the number of species in a larger sample has found important applications in fields far removed from ecology. Here we address the general problem of estimating the number of…
The assessment of diversity and similarity is relevant in monitoring the status of ecosystems. The respective indicators are based on the taxonomic composition of biological communities of interest, currently estimated through the…
In ecology, the description of species composition and biodiversity calls for statistical methods that involve estimating features of interest in unobserved samples based on an observed one. In the last decade, the Bayesian nonparametrics…
Source-sink systems are metapopulations of habitat patches with different, and possibly temporally varying, habitat qualities, which are commonly used in ecology to study the fate of spatially extended natural populations. We propose new…
We present new theoretical and empirical results on the probability distributions of species persistence times in natural ecosystems. Persistence times, defined as the timespans occurring between species' colonization and local extinction…
This paper focuses on a core task in computational sustainability and statistical ecology: species distribution modeling (SDM). In SDM, the occurrence pattern of a species on a landscape is predicted by environmental features based on…
Biogeographical regions (geographically distinct assemblages of species and communities) constitute a cornerstone for ecology, biogeography, evolution and conservation biology. Species turnover measures are often used to quantify…
Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this…
Accurate estimates of microbial species abundances are needed to advance our understanding of the role that microbiomes play in human and environmental health. However, artificially constructed microbiomes demonstrate that intuitive…
The delimitation of biological species, i.e., deciding which individuals belong to the same species and whether and how many different species are represented in a data set, is key to the conservation of biodiversity. Much existing work…
Investigation of species abundance has become a vital component of many ecological monitoring studies. The primary objective of these studies is to understand how specific species are distributed across the study domain, as well as…
In human microbiome studies, sequencing reads data are often summarized as counts of bacterial taxa at various taxonomic levels specified by a taxonomic tree. This paper considers the problem of analyzing two repeated measurements of…
A taxonomy is a standardized framework to classify and organize items into categories. Hierarchical taxonomies are ubiquitous, ranging from the classification of organisms to the file system on a computer. Characterizing the typical…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Quantifying diversity is of central importance for the study of structure, function and evolution of microbial communities. The estimation of microbial diversity has received renewed attention with the advent of large-scale metagenomic…
An analytical approximation is derived for the Zero Sum Multinomial distribution which gives the Species Abundance Distribution in Neutral Community Models. The obtained distribution function describes well computer simulation results on…
This paper addresses the problem of estimating the containment and similarity between two sets using only random samples from each set, without relying on sketches of full sets. The study introduces a binomial model for predicting the…