An Application of Markov Chain Monte Carlo to Community Ecology

Act 1. In 1975 Jared Diamond, who has since become famous as the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, published a paper based mainly on a big matrix of Os and is [4]. Each row of Diamond's matrix' corresponded to a bird species; each column corresponded to an island in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). The Is and Os recorded the presence or absence of the species on the islands. In his paper, Diamond proposed a set of seven "community assembly rules" that he had inferred from the patterns in his co-occurrence matrix. These rules, said Diamond, govern the way species organize themselves into communities.

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