Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © Royal Society, 2005. This article is posted here by permission of Royal Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 272 (2005): 285-287, doi:10.1098/rspb.2004.2955.
Description:
A common approach to estimating the number of species in a taxonomic or other group is to extrapolate the temporal pattern of historical species discoveries or descriptions. A formal statistical approach to this problem is described. This approach involves fitting an explicit model of the discovery record by maximum like lihood and using the fitted model to estimate the number of undiscovered species. The approach is applied to a description record of large marine animals covering the period 1828-1996. The estimated number of undiscovered species in this group is around 10 with an upper 0.95 confidence bound of around 16.
Keywords:
Large marine animals
;
Maximum likelihood estimation
;
Non-stationary poisson process
;
Taxonomy
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
87145 bytes
Format:
application/pdf
Permalink
