Fig. 1

Results of distributing N = 10⁷ individuals belonging to S = 10⁵ species across a 2-D landscape (see S1 Fig). Subplots (a-d): Estimated and true richness under a) an unrealistic scenario where taxa are uniformly distributed in space with similar abundances, b) where species have uneven distributions of abundance but uniform distributions in space, c) where species have even distributions of abundance but aggregated distributions in space, and d) an ecologically realistic scenario where species have both uneven distributions of abundance and aggregated spatial distributions. For c and d, mean and standard deviations of normally distributed species spatial distributions where chosen at random. Information, source code, and simulated data can be found at https://www.github.com/LennonLab/census