Simple null model analysis subsumes a new species co-occurrence index: A comment on Mainali et al. (2022)

Abstract

Recently, Mainali et al. (2022, termed MSSF henceforth) proposed a new index of pair-wise species co-occurrence based on the log odds ratio α of conditional occurrence probability. Under the assumption that the total numbers of occurrences of both species are fixed in a number of sites, they demonstrate that the associated random distribution of paired occurrences follows a non-central hypergeometric distribution, with α being the single unknown parameter....