title: Which models are appropriate for six subtropical forests: species-area and species-abundance models.
abstract: The species-area relationship is one of the most important topic in the study of species diversity, conservation biology and landscape ecology. The species-area relationship curves describe the increase of species number with increasing area, and have been modeled by various equations. In this paper, we used detailed data from six 1-ha subtropical forest communities to fit three species-area relationship models. The coefficient of determination and F ratio of ANOVA showed all the three models fitted well to the species-area relationship data in the subtropical communities, with the logarithm model performing better than the other two models. We also used the three species-abundance distributions, namely the lognormal, logcauchy and logseries model, to fit them to the species-abundance data of six communities. In this case, the logcauchy model had the better fit based on the coefficient of determination. Our research reveals that the rare species always exist in the six communities, corroborating the neutral theory of Hubbell. Furthermore, we explained why all species-abundance figures appeared to be left-side truncated. This was due to subtropical forests have high diversity, and their large species number includes many rare species.
authors.affiliation: Guilin University of Electronic Technology, GuiLin 541004, China.
authors.forename: Shi Guang
authors.initials: SG
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.affiliation: Guilin University of Electronic Technology, GuiLin 541004, China.
authors.forename: Lin
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Guilin University of Electronic Technology, GuiLin 541004, China.
authors.forename: Zhen Cheng
authors.initials: ZC
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: South China Botanical Garden, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, GuangZhou, 510650, China.
authors.forename: Ju Yu
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Lian
authors.affiliation: Changjiang Water Resources Protection Institute, WuHan, 430051, China.
authors.forename: Guo Jun
authors.initials: GJ
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: South China Botanical Garden, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, GuangZhou, 510650, China.
authors.forename: Zhong Liang
authors.initials: ZL
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Guangdong Forest Research Institute, GuangZhou, 510520, China.
authors.forename: Zuo Yun
authors.initials: ZY
authors.lastname: Yin
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D044822:Biodiversity; D002681:China; D002980:Climate; D065928:Forests; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D063148:Plant Dispersal; D014197:Trees
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