iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Alroy @johnalroy.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The Fossilworks database is now integrated with the Ecological Register and includes growing datasets on Cenozoic and Cretaceous vertebrates including mammals and dinosaurs. All of the 5000+ site inventories include specimen counts used to obtain GW species richness estimates. fossilworks.org

02112

John Alroy @johnalroy.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

The Ecological Register now features an interactive mapping tool that lets you find ecological and palaeontological survey data. You can search using Latin names, English names, and time interval names. Click on a link and you can download all the surveys. The home page lists major data sets.

151

John Alroy @johnalroy.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Back that up. What exactly is wrong, how is it not addressed in the 16 section-long discussion, and how is my main argument affected? Take another look at Fig. 5A, for example. "A better alternative is the Poisson log-normal distribution" (O'Hara 2005), but assuming it invalidates H and D.

020

John Alroy @johnalroy.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Fisher's alpha goes down, not up, as more stems are randomly drawn from across the BCI plot (upper green line). But it goes up if stems are drawn in order going SW-to-NE across the plot (lower). Chao 1 rises steeply (red). CEGS doesn't (upper blue) while capturing the area signal (lower blue).

010

John Alroy @johnalroy.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Methods matter! BCI tree diversity partitioned by size class (5 cm DBH running window). CEGS (blue): flat, then a sudden drop ~40 cm. Chao 1: lower, different, and higher variance. CBR/alpha/theta (orange/purple/pink): ~50% increase on the way up to ~25 cm. But diversity should always decline.

021

John Alroy @johnalroy.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

The BCI manuscript is now done. The log series and ZSM fit the overall 50 ha data poorly. They predict the 1 ha subplot data just as poorly (last post) and underestimate beta diversity (new graph). CEGS is of course best. Manuscript available upon request: comments would be very much appreciated.

030

John Alroy @johnalroy.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

CEGS wins again. Predictive test based on the 50 ha BCI tree plot dataset of Hubbell/Foster/Condit (thanks). CEGS fits to species counts in 1 ha plots better predict counts in 9 plots to the east (blue). PLN wins once (red). Log series loses every time. Likelihood ratio cutoff is 10:1.

020

John Alroy @johnalroy.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

No problem. It's CEGS. Here's a "subsample at random and estimate richness" analysis of the classic BCI data set of Condit et al. (1996). CEGS asymptotes almost immediately. OPR is much the same. ACE and Chao 1 are way off, consistent with your results. Great paper, I totally agree with it.

Richness estimates based on randomly subsampling the BCI tree data set

010