Biodiversity Patterns

Individual species distributions can be stacked to create so called Presence-Absence Matrices, or PAMS. The properties of PAMs reveal much about the biodiversity pattern. Below there is a richness-diversity plot that summarizes much of the information in a PAM.

scatterplot graph with detailed description immediately following
The graph is a scatterplot of all cells in a grid subdividing North America, plotting the mean similarity of the collection of species in a cell, to all the other cells, plotted against the proportional number of species in the cell.