Rarefaction (ecology)

Rarefaction is a technique used in ecology to estimate species richness from the results of sampling. It works by plotting rarefaction curves, which chart the number of species found against the number of samples taken, curves that typically rise quickly at first as common species are discovered and then level off as only rarer species remain to be found. Rarefaction addresses the problem that larger samples naturally turn up more species, by randomly resampling from a larger pool of collected samples to estimate how many species a smaller sample would be expected to contain, which allows fair comparison between datasets of different sizes. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/