The Self-Similarity Curve: a New Method of Determining the Sampling Effort Required to Characterize Communities

ABSTRACT

Species-area curves are frequently used to suggest sampling effort requirements for characterization of communities. However, this method utilizes only species richness information, while ignoring species identities and abundances. By plotting H′ (Shannon-Weaver diversity) against sampling effort, species richness and species abundances are considered, but species identities are still ignored. The self-similarity method described here utilizes information on species richness, species abundances, and species identities to suggest sampling effort requirements. This self-similarity curve plots the Morisita similarity of two sample sets from a single community against progressively larger sampling effort. When sampling effort sufficiently represents a community, the similarity plateaus near a value of one.