Compositional dissimilarity as a robust measure of ecological distance

TLDR: In this article, the authors evaluated the robustness of quantitative measures of compositional dissimilarity between sites using extensive computer simulations of species' abundance patterns over one and two dimensional configurations of sample sites in ecological space.

Abstract: The robustness of quantitative measures of compositional dissimilarity between sites was evaluated using extensive computer simulations of species’ abundance patterns over one and two dimensional configurations of sample sites in ecological space. Robustness was equated with the strength, over a range of models, of the linear and monotonic (rank-order) relationship between the compositional dissimilarities and the corresponding Euclidean distances between sites measured in the ecological space. The range of models reflected different assumptions about species’ response curve shape, sampling pattern of sites, noise level of the data, species’ interactions, trends in total site abundance, and beta diversity of gradients.