J.M. Diamond, 1975. Measuring species extinction order Species distributions within naturally fragmented habitat have been found to often exhibit patterns of pronounced nestedness. Highly predictable extinction sequences are implied by these nested species distribution patterns, thus the patterns are important to both the philosophy and practice of conservation biology. As island area shrinks, there will always be one species more at risk of local extinction than any other due to its areal requirements. The work reported here attempts to measure the extent of the nestedness order in presence-absence matrices, as well as to provide a risk assessment of the extinction probability of the various species' populations isolated on islands of fragmented habitat.
All physical observations are a mixture of signal and noise.
Nestedness is no different. The continuum that exists between the extremes of complete order and complete randomness can be described in the simplest of thermodynamic terms. Analyzing species composition in fragments. Atmar, W. and B.D. Patterson. The measure of order and disorder in the distribution of species in fragmented habitat.