Subject(s)
Extinction, Biological , Minor Planets , Animals , Climate Change , Geological Phenomena , Mexico , Seawater , Vertebrates , Volcanic EruptionsABSTRACT
The history, definitions, and transdisciplinary extent of pseudoreplication, as well as some key concepts of experimental design, are briefly reviewed. Pseudoreplication, sometimes also referred to as the 'unit of analysis error,' is one of the commonest errors of statistical analysis and interpretation. It is a simple albeit serious one. It persists in part because of the failure of statisticians and scientists to develop a clear, consistent terminology for the concepts of statistics, experimental design, and sampling design that is used across all disciplines, as well as a terminology for specific categories of the more common errors. Lack of a clear terminology, in turn, has fostered narrow, discipline-specific jargon, inconsistency among textbooks and reference works, and ineffective teaching. Reform of terminology is possible, and great improvement in statistical practice would follow.
Subject(s)
Behavior, Animal , Ecology , Interdisciplinary Communication , Reproducibility of Results , Research Design/statistics & numerical data , Analysis of Variance , Animals , Bias , Cluster Analysis , Cooperative Behavior , Humans , Meta-Analysis as Topic , Models, Statistical , Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic/statistics & numerical data , Terminology as TopicABSTRACT
The recent literature on species diversity contains many semantic, conceptual, and technical problems. It is suggested that, as a result of these problems, species diversity has become a meaningless concept, that the term be abandoned, and that ecologists take a more critical approach to species-number relations and rely less on information theoretic and other analogies. As multispecific collections of organisms possess numerous statistical properties which conform to the conventional criteria for diversity indices, such collections are not intrinsically arrangeable in linear order along some diversity scale. Several such properties or "species composition parameters" having straightforward biological interpretations are presented as alternatives to the diversity approach. The two most basic of these are simply âµ1 =[n/n-1][1-Σi (N _i/_N)2 ] =the proportion of potential interindividual encounters which is interspecific (as opposed to intraspecific), assuming every individual in the collection can encounter all other individuals, E(Sn ) = Σi [1-(N-Nin )/(Nn )] =the expected number of species in a sample of n individuals selected at random from a collection containing N individuals, S species, and Ni individuals in the ith species.
