Assessment of richness estimation methods on macroinvertebrate communities of mountain ponds in Castilla y León (Spain)

Abstract

-Complete inventories of the fauna at a given place, for a specific community or geographical area are often exceedingly hard to get. In recent years a number of estimation techniques have emerged that can be used to extrapolate from these samples to the true number of species in an area. These estimation models are based on different mathematical approaches and can be classified as either species accumulation curves or nonparametric estimators (Brose et al., 2003, Ecology, 84, 2364-2377. In this paper, we have tested the performance of some of the richness estimators on nineteen mountain ponds in Castilla y Leo´n (Spain) in order to provide guidance on their potential use in future researches. We collected benthic macroinvertebrate of these ponds from the littoral zone with a pond net by kicking and sweeping. Ten-second samples were collected in each pond up to a total time of 3 to 5 minutes per pond, depending on the pond size. In addition, two of the ponds, were sampled in 2004, 2006 and 2007 providing a three-year time series. The results of this study showed that Jackknife 2 was the best of the evaluated methods based on all chosen criteria and also performed well across all studied ponds. Jackknife 1, Chao 1 and Chao 2 also presented good results and they were inferior to Jackknife 2 mainly because of the requirement for larger sub-sample sizes.

Assessing copepod (Crustacea: Copepoda) species richness at different spatial scales in northwestern Romanian caves

“…Both species richness estimators failed to reach a stable value for hypogean species, while ICE reached the stable value of 35 epigean species after seven out of nine caves. Both estimators recorded higher estimates for patchy distribution and exhibited DISCUSSION From the available estimators (Chazdon et al 1998;Walther and Morand 1998;Chiarucci et al 2001;Brose 2002;Brose and Martinez 2004;Martínez-Sanz et al 2010) some were tested for a more accurate picture of species richness patterns. To date, for vadose assemblages, only rarefaction curves and Chao estimator were used to assess copepod species richness at local and regional scale in the Dinaric Mountains of Slovenia (Pipan and Culver 2007).…”

Electrofishing efficiency in low conductivity neotropical streams: towards a non‐destructive fish sampling method

“…Species richness per site was estimated using the Chao estimator (Chao 1984;Shen et al 2003). It is commonly used to determine the richness of organisms in natural environments based on repeated quantitative samples (Brose et al 2003;Mart ınez-Sanz et al 2010).…”

Change does not happen overnight: a case study on stream macroinvertebrates

“…To ensure that the results were consistent, the completeness of the entire taxa inventory generated was assessed using a nonparametric estimator (chao2, the "specpool" function of the R package "vegan"), as suggested by Walther and Moore (2005), which has already been used in macroinvertebrate community analyses (e.g., Martínez-Sanz et al, 2010).…”