Stochastic Abundance Models in Ecology

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Abstract
Historical remarks on the development of various curve-fitting procedures and data-plots are given as an introduction to the topic, including modern terminology. In particular the concept of structural distributions used in describing the structure of communities is considered. Examples of derivation of well-known results are summarized. The relevance of the models in ecological work is discussed generally, pointing towards future work and unsolved problems. Specific areas include the general improvement of sampling assumption, the need for a wider concept of abundance than density of individuals, procedures for testing goodness of fit, which are very insufficiently dealt with in the literature, and similarity measures and the simultaneous description of 2 or more communities.