Species-abundance models for brachiopods across the Ordovician-Silurian boundary of South China

摘要

>Species-abundance models have been an important method for investigating community structure in modern biology in the past decades. Different species-abundance models can reflect different ecological meanings. The method is relatively new to palaeoecology. We take the latest Ordovician-earliest Silurian Cathaysiorthis brachiopod fauna of South China as an example, program the calculation in the R language, introduce the application of the species-abundance models and discuss the relationship between the abundance model and the ecological bathymetry of a certain brachiopod fauna. Finally, we testify the validity of the method and suggest that the species-abundance models should be treated as one of the supporting evidences in investigating the brachiopod palaeoecology.