Joining the Incompatible: Exploiting Floristic Lists for the Sample-based Estimation of Species Richness

Alessandro Chiarucci (), Rosa Maria Di Biase (), Lorenzo Fattorini (), Marzia Marcheselli () and Caterina Pisani ()

Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena

Abstract: The lists of species obtained by purposive sampling by field ecologists are used to improve the sample-based estimation of species richness. The estimation criterion is a modification of the difference estimator in which the species inclusion probabilities are estimated by means of the species frequencies from incidence data. If the species list used to support the estimation is complete the estimator guesses the true richness without error. Moreover, contrary to the nonparametric estimators, our estimator provides values invariably greater than the number of species detected by the combination of sample-based and purposive surveys. A presumably asymptotically conservative estimator of the mean squared error is also provided. A simulation study based on two artificial populations is carried out in order to check the performance of the proposed estimator with respect to the familiar nonparametric estimators. Finally, the proposed estimator is adopted to estimate species richness in the Maremma Regional Park, Italy.

Keywords: Difference estimator; Probabilistic sampling; Purposive survey; Supporting list; Simulation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C15 C18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm and nep-ore
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:usi:wpaper:753

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