20.10.2021: Adam CLARK (Graz) How observation scale biases estimates of ecological stability, and how to fix it, HS 02.11, Institut für Biologie, Bereich für Zoologie, Universitätsplatz 2, 13:15 Uhr.
Ecological stability relates to a family of metrics that describe how species abundances vary over time and in response to disturbance. Because it can help predict the long-term behavior and survival of species and ecological communities, accurately measuring ecological stability is of vital importance to conservation and management, and represents one of the primary focuses of community ecology. However, a major challenge is that observations of ecological stability are highly scale dependent - that is, depending on the spatial, temporal, or ecological scale at which data are collected and aggregated, even repeated measurements within a single site and system, and using a single metric, can return different results. Here, I discuss the kinds of bias that can arise from this scale dependence, and present a few statistical tricks for helping to reduce these biases.