Rarefaction, Alpha Diversity, and Statistics

Understanding the drivers of diversity is a fundamental question in ecology. Extensive literature discusses different methods for describing diversity and documenting its effects on ecosystem health and function. However, it is widely believed that diversity depends on the intensity of sampling. I discuss a statistical perspective on diversity, framing the diversity of an environment as an unknown parameter, and discussing the bias and variance of plug-in and rarefied estimates. I describe the state of the statistical literature for addressing these problems, focusing on the analysis of microbial diversity. I argue that latent variable models can address issues with variance, but bias corrections need to be…

• UO
  University of Washington
• NI
  National Institutes of Health

  Awards: R35GM133420, 2013, 2014
• NI
  National Institute of General Medical Sciences