Patterns in nature: the analysis of species co-occurrences

Abstract

The distribution of species on islands -- Patterns or fantasies? -- Species co-occurrences -- The night sky effect -- Patterns in nature -- Finding the null -- What this book is about -- How this book is organized -- Diamond's assembly rules -- Robert Macarthur, 1930-1972 -- Special islands and their birds -- What is a checkerboard distribution? -- Incidence -- The theoretical context -- The cuckoo doves -- Patchy distributions -- The response of Connor and Simberloff -- The backlash -- How likely are checkerboards? -- Prior expectations -- The analysis of Vanuatu -- A technical interlude -- How to incorporate constraints into incidence matrices -- Definitions and notation -- The numbers of null matrices and the effect of constraints -- The hypergeometric distribution -- The three ecological constraints proposed by Connor and Simberloff in their studies of birds and bats on islands -- Incidence -- Why constraints? and what does "representative" mean? -- How to fill the sample null space -- Null space creation algorithms -- Creating a uniform random sample null space -- The trial-swap algorithm -- How to characterize incidence matrices -- Then you need a metric -- The metric of Connor and Simberloff -- Wright and Biehl -- Harvey et al.'s (1983) review of null models in ecology -- Stone and Roberts (1990, 1992) and Roberts and Stone -- Why ensemble metrics fail: an example -- Reanalysis and extensions -- Vanuatu and the Galapagos -- The birds of Vanuatu -- The birds of the Galapagos -- The birds of the Bismarck and Solomon islands -- The issue of superspecies -- The patterns -- Taxonomic sieving and incidence effects -- Which genera develop checkerboards? -- Caveats -- When the incidences do not overlap -- Coda -- Species along a gradient -- The herptofauna of Mount Kupe, Cameroon -- Why do the results differ from previous results? -- The second question: do species form distinct communities? -- Applications to food webs: nestedness and reciprocal specialization -- Nestedness -- Groupings of species interactions -- Coda -- Macarthur's original vision -- The patterns themselves -- The need for null hypotheses