Let’s review some of the concepts we’ve been talking about so far this semester -

• What are some of the ways that we’ve talked about measuring biodiversity?

• How have we been thinking about the role of abundance in quantifying biodiversity?

• In the McGill et al paper - what is different about the biodiversity pattern that they are discussing from the other ways we’ve been quantifying biodiversity?

• Two of the most common projections of the vector of species abundances is the rank abundance distribution and the histogrm of binned abundances (Fig 1 has examples). What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches?

• What do abundance distributions reflect? (i.e. What do we think they tell us?)

• What are the four general approaches to modeling the species abundance distribution that exist?

There are two ways that abundance distributions are used in the literature. 1) to test specific theories of community assembly and 2) as a tool for gaining better understanding of ecosystems that are hard to study directly. the ter Stege et al. Paper is an example of the latter use of species abundance distributions.

• What are ter Stege et al using the species abundance distribution to do?

• How are they using it to answer their question?

• Let’s think about their results in the context of what we’ve learned about community assembly and the thinking behind what the rank abundance distribution may be telling us about resource partitioning.