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Article Dans Une Revue Marine Micropaleontology Année : 2019

Statistical confidence intervals for relative abundances and abundance-based ratios: Simple practical solutions for an old overlooked question

Résumé

Micropaleontologists often consider relative abundances of taxa to infer past ecological, environmental and climate conditions and dynamics. However, most published micropaleontological studies involving relative abundance data still do not routinely consider the counting uncertainty inherent to any sample, and thus simply ignore the statistical confidence interval (CI) related to a relative abundance or abundance-based ratio value. In an attempt to make this rather classic computation freely and easily available to the scientific community, we highlight here the calculation of binomial proportion CIs based on the 'exact' Clopper-Pearson method as implemented in the user-friendly PAST freeware. We also introduce a general solution for the computation of the CI related to any abundance-based ratio. In all cases, we strongly recommend that future studies involving taxonomic abundance-based data should systematically display the CIs associated to sample estimates, the only way to integrate sampling uncertainties into result interpretation.
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Dates et versions

hal-02171935 , version 1 (03-07-2019)

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Baptiste Suchéras-Marx, Gilles Escarguel, Jorge Ferreira. Statistical confidence intervals for relative abundances and abundance-based ratios: Simple practical solutions for an old overlooked question. Marine Micropaleontology, 2019, 151 (101751), pp.1-6. ⟨10.1016/j.marmicro.2019.101751⟩. ⟨hal-02171935⟩
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