Pisces Conservation - Species Diversity & Richness (SDR) - Review
| Invaluable software for ecologists -
'Species diversity and richness'
From 'Plant Talk', Issue 18, July 1999 Plant Talk, P.O.Box 500 Kingston upon Thames Surrey KT2 5XB,UK. |
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The attractive packaging surrounding the disk certainly promises
'Species diversity and richness'. The setup program ran without a
problem and the application was ready to go. The program has the
familiar Windows front end and immediately presents you with a selection
of species diversity and richness topics to explore. Demonstration data
are provided to allow the user to gain familiarity with the program. Species counts for sites can be entered directly or imported from a comma-delimited file with a simple format, allowing easy creation in any text editor, spreadsheet, database, etc. The statistical methods that can be applied are grouped into the following eight topics: alpha diversity, diversity ordering, species richness, abundance, distributions, data simulation, beta diversity and special scores. When a topic is selected an associated list of methods appears, for example Shannon Wiener under the alpha diversity topic. There are plenty of methods available. When a method is applied to the data, tabulated results appear in a separate window. They can be viewed graphically, and bootstrap and randomisation tests can be applied to obtain confidence intervals. A Windows hyper-help system provides clear information on program use, as well as each statistical method with references. An uninstall program is also provided, not that you'd want to use it. This is an excellent, very easy to use package and (as it claims) "offers all the analytical tools that a general ecologist needs for analysing and comparing the diversity of communities". JONATHAN COOPER Biological Records Centre, Monks Wood |