On plotting species abundance distributions

There has been a revival of interest in species abundance distribution (SAD) models, stimulated by the claim that the log-normal distribution gave an underestimate of the observed numbers of rare species in species-rich assemblages. This led to the development of the neutral Zero Sum Multinomial distribution (ZSM) to better fit the observed data. Yet plots of SADs, purportedly of the same data, showed differences in frequencies of species and of statistical fits to the ZSM and log-normal models due to the use of different binning methods. We plot six different binning methods for the Barro Colorado Island (BCI) tropical tree data. The appearances of the curves are very different for the different binning methods. Consequently, the fits to different models may vary depending on the binning system used. There is no agreed binning method for SAD plots. Our analysis suggests that a simple doubling of the number of individuals per species in each bin is perhaps the most practical one for illustrative purposes. Alternatively rank-abundance plots should be used. For fitting and testing models exact methods have been developed and application of these does not require binning of data. Errors are introduced unnecessarily if data are binned before testing goodness-of-fit to models.