Simultaneous Confidence Inference on Species Accumulation Curves

• Published in: Journal of agricultural, biological, and environmental statistics Vol. 17; no. 1; pp. 1 - 14
• Main Authors: Li, Jun, Mao, Chang Xuan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York International Biometric Society and the American Statistical Association 01.04.2012; Springer-Verlag; American Statistical Association; International Biometric Society; Springer
• Subjects: Agriculture; Agronomy. Soil science and plant productions; Algorithms; Animal behavior; Aviculture; Binomials; Biological and medical sciences; Biometrics; Biometrics, statistics, experimental designs, modeling, agricultural computer applications; Biostatistics; Bird banding; Calibration; Confidence interval; Ecosystems; Estimators; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Generalities. Biometrics, experimentation. Remote sensing; Health Sciences; Inference; Mathematics and Statistics; Medicine; Monitoring/Environmental Analysis; Species; Statistics; Statistics for Life Sciences; Bootstrap calibration; Binomial mixture; Species accumulation curve; Species richness; Bootstrap; Accumulation
• ISSN: 1085-7117; 1537-2693
• DOI: 10.1007/s13253-011-0062-x

A species accumulation curve is a useful tool in ecology. We construct a simultaneous confidence band for a single species accumulation curve, as an improvement over the existing point-wise confidence band. We also construct a simultaneous confidence band for the difference between two species accumulation curves, as a graphical procedure used to compare two species assemblages. A bootstrap-based calibration algorithm is adopted to tune the coverage probability of a confidence band toward its desired confidence level. The performance of the proposed procedures is demonstrated using both simulated data and real data.