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Rarefaction and rarefiction—the use and abuse of a method in paleoecology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2016

John C. Tipper
John C. Tipper*
Affiliation:
Department of Geology, University College, Galway, Ireland
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Abstract

Rarefaction is a method for comparing community diversities that has consistently been abused by paleoecologists: here its assumptions are clarified and advice given on its application. Rarefaction should be restricted to comparison of collections from communities that are taxonomically similar and from similar habitats: the collections should have been obtained by using standardised procedures. The rarefaction curve is a graph of the estimated species richness of sub-samples drawn from a collection, plotted against the size of sub-sample: it is a deterministic transform of the collection's species-abundance distribution. Although rarefaction curves can be compared statistically, it may be more efficient to compare the species-abundance distributions directly. Both types of comparison are discussed in detail.

Type
Research Article
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , Fall 1979 , pp. 423 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

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References

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