SURVEYING NATURAL POPULATIONS: QUANTITATIVE TOOLS FOR ASSESSING BIODIVERSITY.: By Lee-Ann C. Hayek and Martin A. Buzas. Columbia University Press, New York, USA, 2nd edition, ISBN 978-0-231-14620-3, 590 p. US$85.00.

Abstract

Ecology and paleoecology have over the past 40 or so years undergone a profound quantitative revolution, and techniques for assessing biodiversity have not been excluded. It is no longer adequate to assess the diversity of a community by stating only the number of species it contains; such a statistic gives equal weight to both common and rare species and ignores the effect of sample size on species numbers. Likewise, two or more communities cannot be compared on the basis of their number of species alone. Instead, one has at least to ask how the proportional abundances of species at the two sites compare. This begs the question, how can the structural differences between two communities be quantified? Also, what is the ecological significance of the difference between two community structures? Consequently, anybody entering (paleo)ecology nowadays must be comfortable not only with ecological concepts but also with at least the basic statistical techniques for measuring biodiversity. As noted by McKillup and Dyar (2010), such statistical methods can be used both to test and generate hypotheses. Older publications explaining statistical measures of diversity are many and not always easy to use. Magurran (1988, 2004) did sterling …