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- Title
The pairwise approach to analysing species co-occurrence.
- Authors
Veech, Joseph A.; Araújo, Miguel
- Abstract
The analysis of species co-occurrence patterns continues to be a main pursuit of ecologists, primarily because the coexistence of species is fundamentally important in evaluating various theories, principles and concepts. Examples include community assembly, equilibrium versus non-equilibrium organization of communities, resource partitioning and ecological character displacement, the local-regional species diversity relationship, and the metacommunity concept. Traditionally, co-occurrence has been measured and tested at the level of an entire species presence-absence matrix wherein various algorithms are used to randomize matrices and produce statistical null distributions of metrics that quantify structure in the matrix. This approach implicitly recognizes a presence-absence matrix as having some real ecological identity (e.g. a set of species exhibiting nestedness among a set of islands) in addition to being a unit of statistical analysis. An emerging alternative is to test for non-random co-occurrence between paired species. The pairwise approach does not analyse matrix-level structure and thus views a species pair as the fundamental unit of co-occurrence. Inferring process from pattern is very difficult in analyses of co-occurrence; however, the pairwise approach may make this task easier by simplifying the analysis and resulting inferences to associations between paired species.
- Subjects
COEXISTENCE of species; SPECIES diversity; COMPETITION (Biology); STATISTICAL hypothesis testing; BIOTIC communities
- Publication
Journal of Biogeography, 2014, Vol 41, Issue 6, p1029
- ISSN
0305-0270
- Publication type
Editorial
- DOI
10.1111/jbi.12318