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The species discovery curve will necessarily be increasing, and will normally be negatively accelerated (that is, its rate of increase will slow down). Plotting the curve gives a way of estimating the number of additional species that will be discovered with further effort. This is usually done by
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which equals the number of species that would be discovered if infinite effort is expended. However, some theoretical approaches imply that the logarithmic curve may be more appropriate, implying that though species discovery will slow down with increasing effort, it will never entirely cease, so
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there is no asymptote, and if infinite effort was expended, an infinite number of species would be discovered. An example in which one would not expect the function to asymptote is in the study of genetic sequences where new mutations and sequencing errors may lead to infinite variants.
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of living things recorded in a particular environment as a function of the cumulative effort expended searching for them (usually measured in person-hours). It is related to, but not identical with, the
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Fisher, R. A., Corbet, A. S., & Williams, C. B. (1943). The relation between the number of species and the number of individuals in a random sample of an animal population.
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The first theoretical investigation of the species-discovery process was in a classic paper by Fisher, Corbet and
Williams (1943), which was based on a large collection of
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Efron, B., & Thisted, R. (1976). Estimating the number of unseen species: How many words did
Shakespeare know?
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that will be discovered as a function of cumulative effort studying the behaviour of a species of animal; in
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of a writer from the given sample of his or her recorded works (see Efron & Thisted, 1976).
73:. Theoretical statistical work on the problem continues, see for example the recent paper by
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Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences
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fitting some kind of functional form to the curve, either by eye or by using non-linear
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that are discovered; and in literary studies, it can be used to estimate the total
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57:. The advantage of the negative exponential function is that it tends to an
169:, & Shen, T. J. (2004). Nonparametric prediction in species sampling.
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Journal of
Agricultural Biological and Environmental Statistics, 9
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The same approach is used in many other fields. For example, in
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123:"Estimating terrestrial biodiversity through extrapolation"
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techniques. Commonly used functional forms include the
96:it is now being applied to the number of distinct
77:and Shen (2004). The theory is linked to that of
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192:
121:Colwell, R. K.; Coddington, J. A. (1994-07-29).
32:) is a graph recording the cumulative number of
88:, it can be applied to the number of distinct
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185:Journal of Animal Ecology, 12
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53:function and the negative
26:species accumulation curve
22:species discovery curve
139:10.1098/rstb.1994.0091
90:fixed action patterns
55:exponential function
201:Population ecology
94:molecular genetics
39:species-area curve
206:Community ecology
133:(1311): 101–118.
30:collector's curve
24:(also known as a
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67:butterflies
51:logarithmic
195:Categories
180:, 435–447.
173:, 253–269.
108:References
102:vocabulary
79:Zipf's law
47:regression
147:0962-8436
59:asymptote
187:, 42–58.
167:Chao, A.
86:ethology
69:made in
155:7972351
34:species
18:ecology
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71:Malaya
20:, the
98:genes
151:PMID
143:ISSN
75:Chao
135:doi
131:345
28:or
16:In
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