TY - JOUR
AU - Preston, F. W.
AB - F. w. PRESTON Preston Laboratories, Butler, Pennsylvania SECTION I. GENERAL will never obtain, and much of the present paper will center on this difficulty. Con- The purpose of this paper is to deduce, dition ( 1) wiii not usually obtain in the from a number of examples and from broadest sense, and needs a moment's theoretical considerations, some plausible consideration. general law as to how abundance or com- A geologist sampling an ore-body, monness is distributed among species. Ex- whose boundaries have been delimited perimentally, this could be done by mak- accurately by previous exploration, has a ing a complete census of every species, known "universe" and merely needs in- but, with rare exceptions, this procedure formation on composition. His universe is quite impractical. We therefore at- is permanent. But in ecological work, tempt to deduce the "universe" from a the "universe" changes rapidly. The sample. moths flying tonight are not those that Commonness, as understood by ecolo- flew a month ago, or wiii fly a month gists, has several rather different mean- hence. Those flying this year are a ings: we are here concerned with ( 1) vastly different association from those the total number of living individuals 
TI - The Commonness, And Rarity, of Species
JF - Ecology
DO - 10.2307/1930989
DA - 1948-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/wiley/the-commonness-and-rarity-of-species-MJTBFDdFYu
SP - 254
EP - 283
VL - 29
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -