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BetaBayes—A Bayesian Approach for Comparing Ecological Communities
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| 2.44 MB | Adobe PDF |
Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
Ecological communities change because of both natural and human factors. Distinguishing
between the two is critical to ecology and conservation science. One of the most common approaches
for modelling species composition changes is calculating beta diversity indices and then relating
index changes to environmental changes. The main difficulty with these analyses is that beta
diversity indices are paired comparisons, which means indices calculated with the same community
are not independent. Mantel tests and generalised dissimilarity modelling (GDM) are two of the
most commonly used statistical procedures for analysing such data, employing randomisation tests
to consider the data’s dependence. Here, we introduce a Bayesian model-based approach called
BetaBayes that explicitly incorporates the data dependence. This approach is based on the Bradley–
Terry model, which is a widely used approach for modelling paired comparisons that involves
building a standard regression model containing two varying intercepts, one for each community
involved in the beta diversity index, that capture their respective contributions. We used BetaBayes
to analyse a famous dataset collected in Panama that contains information on multiple 1 ha plots
from the rain forests of Panama. We calculated the Bray–Curtis index between all pairs of plots,
analysed the relationship between the index and two covariates (geographic distance and elevation),
and compared the results of BetaBayes with those from the Mantel test and GDM. BetaBayes has
two distinctive features. The first is its flexibility, which allows the user to quickly change it to fit
the data structure; namely, by adding varying effects, incorporating spatial autocorrelation, and
modelling complex nonlinear relationships. The second is that it provides a clear path for performing
model validation and model improvement. BetaBayes avoids hypothesis testing, instead focusing on
recreating the data generating process and quantifying all the model configurations that are consistent
with the observed data
Descrição
Palavras-chave
beta diversity community similarity pairwise comparisons Bradley–Terry models Panama
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Dias, F.S.; Betancourt, M.; Rodríguez-González, P.M.; Borda-de-Água, L. BetaBayes—A Bayesian Approach for Comparing Ecological Communities. Diversity 2022, 14, 858
Editora
MDPI