Species accumulation functions and pure birth processes (Q5956492)

In ecology, a species accumulation function \(S(t)\) is a curve that represents the expected number of different species observed in a geographical region as a function of a measure of the effort \(t\) to collect them. Different forms of \(S(t)\) are considered on the basis of biological arguments and empirical data, and \(S(t)\) is assumed to be the mean of a pure birth process. This problem is discussed by a lot of authors. There is an inconsistency in their approach in that the functions \(S(t)\) they postulate are generally not means of pure birth processes, although their intuition is sound. In this note, a justification is provided for using pure birth processes as an approximation for modelling species accumulation functions of a large class, which includes the ones they consider. The statistical inference and model assessment procedures require the variance of pure birth processes, which is generally unknown. In this note two side bounds for the mean and variance of the constructed pure birth processes are provided.