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- Title
How many freshwater diatoms are pH specialists? A response to.
- Authors
Telford, Richard J.; Vigdis, Vandvik; Birks, H. J. B.
- Abstract
Pither & Aarssen (2005) propose a null model approach to assess the proportion of niche specialist taxa along ecological gradients. They apply this methodology to a large data set of lacustrine diatom assemblages and conclude that a majority of the taxa are generalists on a pH gradient. This conflicts with previous work, which shows that many diatom taxa have a statistically significant relationship with pH. We demonstrate the methods used by Pither & Aarssen (2005) have a high Type II error for rare taxa, and that this problem is compounded by the non-uniform sampling of the pH gradient which effectively precludes acid-lake specialist diatoms from being recognized as such. We re-analyse the data used by Pither & Aarssen (2005) and show that most of the diatoms have a statistically significant relationship with pH, and we thus refute their conclusions that few diatom species are specialists.
- Subjects
DIATOMS; PHYTOPLANKTON; ENVIRONMENTAL indicators; ECOLOGICAL niche; ECOLOGY
- Publication
Ecology Letters, 2006, Vol 9, Issue 4, pE1
- ISSN
1461-023X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00875.x