Magurran and Henderson, 2003 - by R. Kiat

Magurran and Henderson, 2003

Magurran, A. E., & Henderson, P. A. (2003). Explaining the excess of rare species in natural species abundance distributions. Nature, 422(6933), 714-716.

Peter A. Henderson

-       Research Director at Pisces Conservation Ltd

-       Lecturer at the University of Oxford (according to Bio on ResearchGate)

-       Pisces Conservation Ltd is “an environmental consultancy, publisher and software house based on the south coast of the UK.”

Websites: http://www.pisces-conservation.com/

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/piscesconservation/

Anne E. Magurran

-       Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of St Andrews

-       Ph.D from the University of Ulster

Paper Summary:

What makes some species rare and others more common in nature? How are these species distributed? In the similar vein to our previous paper with thinking about communities are assembled, Magurran and Henderson (2003) shed further light on this topic as they investigate these questions.

In this study, Magurran and Henderson used a large, long term dataset of a fish community in the UK to show how the community species distributions changed across time. With monthly samples over the course of 21 years with 80 different species and over 96,000 individuals, their data showed two distinct categories – core species: species that were persistent in the community (over 10 years) which were also usually high in abundance; and occasional species: species that were not consistently present in the community (below 10 years) which also tended to be lower in numbers. Using species abundance distributions, Magurran and Henderson demonstrated that core species were log normally distributed, whereas occasional species followed a log series distribution. In using time as a vector instead of space, Magurran and Henderson provide evidence that the categorizations of rare and common species (or in this case, core and occasional species) are not arbitrary. This is important in thinking about what mechanisms might be underlying community structuring e.g. species interactions, stochastic events.