TY  - JOUR
AU  - Picard, N.
AU  - Mortier, F.
AU  - Rossi, V.
AU  - Gourlet-Fleury, S.
PY  - 2010//
TI  - Clustering species using a model of population dynamics and aggregation theory
T2  - Ecol. Model.
JO  - Ecological Modelling
SP  - 152
EP  - 160
VL  - 221
IS  - 2
PB  - ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
KW  - Aggregation theory
KW  - Species grouping
KW  - Species richness
KW  - Tropical rainforest
KW  - Usher model
N2  - The high species diversity of some ecosystems like tropical rainforests goes in pair with the scarcity of data for most species. This hinders the development of models that require enough data for fitting. The solution commonly adopted by modellers consists in grouping species to form more sizeable data sets. Classical methods for grouping species such as hierarchical cluster analysis do not take account of the variability of the species characteristics used for clustering. In this study a clustering method based on aggregation theory is presented. It takes account of the variability of species characteristics by searching for the grouping that minimizes the quadratic error (square bias plus variance) of some model's prediction. This method allows one to check whether the gain in variance brought by data pooling compensate for the bias that it introduces. This method was applied to a data set on 94 tree species in a tropical rainforest in French Guiana, using a Usher matrix model to predict species dynamics. An optimal trade-off between bias and variance was found when grouping species. Grouping species appeared to decrease the quadratic error, except when the number of groups was very small. This clustering method yielded species groups similar to those of the hierarchical cluster analysis using Ward's method when variance was small, that is when the number of groups was small. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
SN  - 0304-3800
N1  - ISI:000273628800004
ID  - Picard_etal2010
ER  -