Abstract
A multi-stage cluster sampling is proposed for quantifying and monitoring plant species richness at multiple spatial grains over large spatial extents. An unbiased estimator of average species richness at different grains and a conservative estimator of its sampling variance are obtained in a complete design-based framework, i.e., avoiding any assumption about the ecological community under study. An application to the Nature Reserve “Lago di Montepulciano” demonstrates that the proposed strategy may accomplish practical advantages and quite satisfactory levels of accuracy.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
Abbreviations
- MP:
-
Macroplot
- PL:
-
Plot
- SP:
-
Subplot
References
Angiolini, C., F. Casini, E. Lorenzini and V. De Dominicis. (in preparation). Analisi della vegetazione e applicazione di metodi per valutare la naturalità di ambienti umidi artificiali nella Riserva Naturale Lago di Montepulciano (SI, Italia Centrale).
Araújo, M.B., P.J. Densham and P.H. Williams. 2004. Representing species in reserves from patterns of assemblage diversity. J. Biogeogr. 31: 1037–1050.
Arrhenius, O. 1921. Species and area. J. Ecol. 9: 95–99.
Barnet, D. and T.J. Stohlgren. 2003. A nested intensity sampling design for plant diversity. Biodiversity and Conservation 9: 67–86.
Barabesi, L. and L. Fattorini. 1998. The use of replicated plot, line and point sampling for estimating species abundances and ecological diversity. Environmental and Ecological Statistics 5: 353–370.
Bassett, S.D. and T.C.Jr. Edwards. 2003. Effectof different sampling schemes on the spatial placement of conservation reserves in Utah, USA. Biol. Conserv. 113: 141–151.
Bunge, J. and M. Fitzpatrick. 1993. Estimating the number of species: a review. J. Amer. Stat. Assoc. 88: 364–373.
Colwell, R.K. and J.A. Coddington. 1994. Estimating terrestrial biodiversity through extrapolation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 345: 101–118.
Connor, E.F. and E.D. McCoy. 1979. The statistics and biology of the species-area relationship. Am. Nat. 113: 791–833.
Cowling, R.M., R.L. Pressey, R. Sims-Castley, A. le Roux, E. Baard, C.J. Burgers and G. Palmer. 2003. The expert or the algorithm?—comparison of priority conservation areas in the Cape Floristic Region identified by park managers and reserve selection software. Biol. Conserv. 112: 147–167.
De Vries, P.G. 1986. Sampling Theory for Forest Inventories. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Dungan, J.L., J.N. Perry, M.R.T. Dale, P. Legendre, S. Citron-Pousty, M.-J. Fortin, A. Jakomulska, M. Miriti and M. S. Rosemberg. 2002. A balanced view of scale in spatial statistical analysis. Ecography 25: 626–640.
Ferretti, M. and A. Chiarucci. 2003. Design concepts adopted in long-term forest monitoring programs in Europe—problems for the future? The Science of The Total Environment 310: 171–178.
Gao, J. 2006. Quantification of grassland properties: how it can benefit from geoinformatic technologies? International Journal of Remote Sensing 27: 1351–1365.
Gleason, H.A. 1922. On the relation between species and area. Ecology 3: 158–162.
Godfray, H.C.J. and J.H. Lawton. 2001. Scale and species numbers. Trends in Ecol. Evol. 16: 400–404.
Goodambe, V.P. 1955. A unified theory of sampling from finite population. J. Royal Stat. Soc. B 17: 269–278.
Gregoire, T.G. 1998. Design-based and model-based inference in survey sampling: appreciating the difference. Can. J. Forest Research 28: 1429–1447.
Harte J., A. Kinzig and J. Green. 1999a. Self-similarity in the distribution and abundance of species. Science 284: 334–336.
Harte J., S. McCarthy, K. Taylor, A. Kinzig and M.L. Fischer. 1999b. Estimating species-area relationships from plot to land-scape scale using species spatial-turnover data. Oikos 86: 45–54.
Hedayat, A.S. and B.K. Sinha. 1991. Design and Inference in Finite Population Sampling. Wiley, New York.
Hortal, J., P.A.V. Borges and C. Gaspar. 2006. Evaluating the performance of species richness estimators: sensitivity to sample grain size. J. Animal Ecol. 75: 274–287.
Keeley J.E. and C.J. Fotheringham. 2005. Plot shape effects on plant species diversity measurements. J. Veg. Sci. 16: 249–256.
Kenkel, N. C., P. Juhász-Nagy and J. Podani. 1989. On sampling procedures in population and community ecology. Vegetatio 83: 195–207.
Legg, C. J. and L. Nagy. 2006. Why most conservation monitoring is, but need not be, a waste of time. Journal of Environmental Management 78: 194–199.
Liu, Q. 1995. A model for species diversity monitoring at community level and its applications. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 34: 271–287.
Mann, C.C. 1991. Extinction: are ecologists crying wolf? Science 253: 709–824.
Palmer, M.W. 1995. How should one count species? Natural Areas Journal 15: 124–135.
Palmer, M.W. and P.S. White. 1994. Scale dependence and the species-area relationship. Am. Nat. 144: 717–740.
Palmer, M.W., P.G. Earls, B.W. Hoagland, P.S. White and T. Wohlgemuth. 2002. Quantitative tools for perfecting species lists. Environmetrics 13: 121–137.
Peet, R.K., T.R. Wentworth and P.S. White. 1998. A flexible, multipurpose method for recording vegetation composition and structure. Castanea 63: 262–274.
Polasky, S., J.D. Camm, A.R. Solow, B. Csuti, D. White and R. Ding. 2000. Choosing reserve networks with incomplete species information. Biol. Conserv. 94: 1–10.
Read, J.M., D.B. Clark, E.M. Venticinque and M.P. Moreira. 2003. Application of merged 1-m and 4-m resolution satellite data to research and management in tropical forests. J. Appl. Ecol. 40: 592–600.
Rodrigues, A.S.L. and K.J. Gaston. 2002. Optimisation in reserve selection procedures: why not? Biol. Conserv. 107: 123–129.
Rodrigues, A.S.L., S.J. Andelman, M.I. Bakarr, L. Boitani, T.M. Brooks, R.M. Cowling, L.D.C. Fishpool, G.A.B. da Fonseca, K.J. Gaston, M. Hoffmann, J.S. Long, P.A. Marquet, J.D. Pilgrim, R.L. Pressey, J. Schipper, W. Sechrest, S.N. Stuart, L.G. Underhill, R.W. Waller, M.E.J. Watts and X. Yan. 2004. Effectiveness of the global protected area network in representing species diversity. Nature 428: 640–643.
Rothley, K.D. and C. Rae. 2005. Working backwards to move forwards: Graph-based connectivity metrics for reserve network selection. Environmental Modelling and Assessment 10: 107–113.
Sarndal, C.E., B. Swensson, and J. Wretman. 1992. Model Assisted Survey Sampling. Springer, New York.
Scheiner, S.M., S.B. Cox, M.R. Willig, G.G. Mittelbach, C. Osenberg and M. Kaspari. 2000. Species richness, species-area curves, and Simpson’s paradox. Evolutionary Ecology Research 2: 791–802.
Shmida, A. 1984. Whittaker’s plant diversity sampling method. Israel J. Bot. 33: 41–46.
Stohlgren, T.J., M.B. Falkner and L.D. Schell. 1995. A modified-Whittaker nested vegetation sampling method. Vegetatio 117: 113–121.
Stohlgren, T.J., A. Owen and M. Lee. 2000. Monitoring shifts in plant diversity in response to climate change: a method for land-scapes. Biodiversity and Conservation 12: 255–278.
Thompson, S.K. 1992. Sampling. Wiley, New York.
Ugland, K.I, J.S. Gray and K.E. Ellingsen. 2003. The species-accumulation curve and estimation of species richness. J. Animal Ecol. 72:888–897.
Whittaker, R.H. 1972. Evolution and measurement of species diversity. Taxon 21: 213–251.
Wolter, K.M. 1985. Introduction to Variance Estimation. Springer, New York.
Yoccoz, N.G., J.D. Nichols and T. Boulinier. 2001. Monitoring of biological diversity in space and time. Trends in Ecol. Evol. 16: 446–453.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
About this article
Cite this article
Baffetta, F., Bacaro, G., Fattorini, L. et al. Multi-stage cluster sampling for estimating average species richness at different spatial grains. COMMUNITY ECOLOGY 8, 119–127 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.8.2007.1.14
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/ComEc.8.2007.1.14