Page 211 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 2

STS486 Tonio D.B. et al.

Inspecting ecological communities structure via
FDA
1
2
Tonio Di Battista ,Francesca Fortuna , Fabrizio Maturo
1
1 University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy
2 National University of Ireland, Galway

Abstract
Despite there is a general recognition that species diversity indicates the status
of the ecosystem or ecological communities, and thus the quality of the living
environment, no consensus measure exists because biodiversity is a very
complex concept that is intrinsically multidimensional and multivariate. For
this reason, both at the academic and institutional level, there is a lively
discussion about how to properly measure and monitor biodiversity. Hence,
this study proposes a new methodological approach for inspecting ecological
communities ‘structure via functional data analysis; specifically, a functional
approach to diversity profiles and some related functional tools is suggested.
This research underlines and shows how each functional tool may highlight
specific aspects of community’s structure and, in addition, an inferential
approach is proposed for building confidence intervals on functional
instruments’ mean. The goal of this research is to provide ecologists,
policymakers, and scholars with additional methods for detecting ecological
communities characteristics. Effectively, the combined use of these
instruments provides a useful method for identifying areas of high
environmental risk.

Keywords
Diversity profile; FDA; biomonitoring; convex functions; bootstrap confidence
bands

1. Introduction
Biodiversity plays a crucial role in environmental monitoring because it is
one of the most important indicator of environmental health (Burger et al.,
2013) as it decreases in relation to ecosystem stressors.
Biodiversity is a multidimensional concept accounting for both species
richness, that is the number of different species in a community; and species
evenness, that is the relative abundance of each species in an area. The main
issue for statisticians is to provide a suitable measure which takes into account
the multivariate nature of biodiversity. Indeed, despite the enormous number
of indices which have been developed to assess biodiversity (see Gove et al.
(1994) for a wide review on this topic), a universally accepted measure has not
been established (Di Battista et al., 2016, 2017). A possible solution to this
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