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Model-Based Approaches To Discovering Diversity : New Implementations, Tests Of Adequacy And An Empirical Application To Central American Diptera, Noah M. Reid

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Most of the earth’s biodiversity is unknown to science. With global climate change set to drastically alter its distribution, it is imperative to catalogue it and understand its function in order to preserve it and better understand how this change will impact humanity. Recent technological and statistical advances have in theory made possible increasingly rapid discovery and description of diversity. The statistical properties and performance of these new approaches are still poorly known, however, their integration with complementary methods from disparate disciplines has not been achieved. In this dissertation we present three chapters of original research that advance these areas …