A generalized approach to the modeling of the species-area relationship.

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a statistical generalized species-area model (GSAM) to represent various patterns of species-area relationship (SAR), which is one of the fundamental patterns in ecology. The approach enables the generalization of many preliminary models, as power-curve model, which is commonly used to mathematically describe the SAR. The GSAM is applied to simulated data set of species diversity in areas of different sizes and a real-world data of insects of Hymenoptera order has been modeled. We show that the GSAM enables the identification of the best statistical model and estimates the number of species according to the area.