Estimating Modern Marine Species Extinction Rates from Ecological Survey Data

• Activity Number: 526
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Woollcott Smith*+ and Andrew Solow
• Companies: Temple University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• Keywords: Species diversity ; beta-binomial ; false absence ; species abundance ; species extinction

Abstract

In studies of species extinction rates the following methodology is often encountered. A list of species present at a specific geographic location is compiled from historical samples and catalogues of museum specimens. This historical species list is then compared with data from a modern quantitative ecological survey. Suppose a species is present in the historical list but absent from the modern survey: this species could be absent from the survey area, that is locally extinct, or it could be present in the survey area in low abundance and thus not found in the modern survey, that is a false absence. We describe several classical parametric models that account for false absence rates and thus yield estimates of extinction rates adjusted for false absences.