title: Sampling species abundance distributions: resolving the veil-line debate.
abstract: Preston's classic work on the theory of species abundance distributions (SADs) in ecology has been challenged by Dewdney. Dewdney contends that Preston's veil-line concept, relating to the shape of sample SADs, is flawed. Here, I show that Preston's and Dewdney's theories can be reconciled by considering the differing mathematical properties of the sampling process on logarithmic (Preston) versus linear (Dewdney) abundance scales. I also derive several related results and show, importantly, that one cannot reject the log-normal distribution as a plausible SAD based only on sampling arguments, as Dewdney and others have done.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA. chisholm@princeton.edu
authors.forename: Ryan A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Chisholm
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D044822:Biodiversity; D003710:Demography; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D016011:Normal Distribution; D011156:Population Density; D012494:Sampling Studies