Surveying Natural Populations: Quantitative Tools for Assessing Biodiversity 0002 Edition

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For more than a decade, Surveying Natural Populations has proven itself as a user-friendly primer to the essential survey methodologies of quantitative field ecology or paleoecology. Combining the intuitive methods of the field researcher with the mathematical precision of the statistician, this second edition now examines, through real world examples, the measures necessary for a complete community assessment and clarifies the confusions between biological and statistical terminology. It emphasizes an understanding of underlying mathematical concepts rather than providing a cookbook of recipes, and in doing so, the authors teach the reader how to incrementally complete a quantitative sampling of any recent or fossil population. The first half of Surveying Natural Populations teaches the fundamentals of ecological assessment. Employing a single data set throughout, initial chapters guide the uninitiated through such topics as estimating densities, relative abundance, occurrences, and determining adequate sample sizes. The second half is extensively revised and includes four new chapters on the newest advances in biodiversity measurement. Through the use of information mathematics and decomposition, the relationship of myriad proposed diversity indices is examined mathematically and inappropriate measures are discarded. What remains is a simple, all-encompassing system called SHE analysis, in which species density, richness, information, and evenness are all explicitly related. This information is then integrated into a simple graphic. The plot, called a biodiversitygram, provides the researcher with a descriptive and inferential tool to assess the biodiversity of any community.