title: Positive interspecific relationship between temporal occurrence and abundance in insects.
abstract: One of the most studied macroecological patterns is the interspecific abundance-occupancy relationship, which relates species distribution and abundance across space. Interspecific relationships between temporal distribution and abundance, however, remain largely unexplored. Using data for a natural assemblage of tabanid flies measured daily during spring and summer in Nova Scotia, we found that temporal occurrence (proportion of sampling dates in which a species occurred in an experimental trap) was positively related to temporal mean abundance (number of individuals collected for a species during the study period divided by the total number of sampling dates). Moreover, two models that often describe spatial abundance-occupancy relationships well, the He-Gaston and negative binomial models, explained a high amount of the variation in our temporal data. As for the spatial abundance-occupancy relationship, the (temporal) aggregation parameter, k, emerged as an important component of the hereby named interspecific temporal abundance-occurrence relationship. This may be another case in which a macroecological pattern shows similarities across space and time, and it deserves further research because it may improve our ability to forecast colonization dynamics and biological impacts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Saint Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. rscrosat@stfx.ca
authors.forename: Ricardo A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Scrosati
authors.forename: Ruth D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: Patten
authors.forename: Randolph F
authors.initials: RF
authors.lastname: Lauff
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D004175:Diptera / Q000145:classification; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009674:Nova Scotia; D011156:Population Density; D013045:Species Specificity