The distance decay of similarity in tropical rainforests. A spatial point processes analytical formulation

Anna Tovo and Marco Favretti

Theoretical Population Biology, 2018, vol. 120, issue C, 78-89

Abstract: In this paper we are concerned with the analytical description of the change in floristic composition (species turnover) with the distance between two plots of a tropical rainforest due to the clustering of the individuals of the different species. We describe the plant arrangement by a superposition of spatial point processes and in this framework we introduce an analytical function which represents the average spatial density of the Sørensen similarity between two infinitesimal plots at distance r. We see that the decay in similarity with the distance is essentially described by the pair correlation function of the superposed process and that it is governed by the most abundant species. We test our analytical model with empirical data obtained for the Barro Colorado Island and Pasoh rainforests. To this end we adopt the statistical estimator for the pair correlation function in Shimatani (2001) and we design a novel one for the Sørensen similarity. Furthermore, we test our analytical formula by modeling the forest study area with Neyman–Scott point processes. We conclude comparing the advantages of our approach with other ones existing in literature.

Keywords: Sørensen similarity; Scale dependence; Neyman–Scott point processes; Pair correlation functions; Minimum contrast method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580917301119
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:120:y:2018:i:c:p:78-89

DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2018.01.001

Access Statistics for this article

Theoretical Population Biology is currently edited by Jeremy Van Cleve

More articles in Theoretical Population Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().