directional and non-directional accumulation curves

Rarefaction of beta diversity

Beta diversity has long been used to summarize the amount of variation in species composition among a set of N sampling units. However, while classical beta diversity provides an estimate of multiple-site dissimilarity among all sampling units, it is not informative on the changes of multiple-site dissimilarity as a function of sampling effort. For gamma diversity, this pattern is usually represented as a species accumulation curve, which is the graph of the number of observed species when the number of plots varies from 1 to N.

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