Abstract: Species assemblage comparison is important in many ecological studies. In this paper, we develop a novel test for comparing species assemblages when abundance data from multiple quadrats are available. The test is based on the zero-inflated Poisson mixture model which we introduce to characterize the species assemblage given abundance data from multiple quadrats. We present a simulation study to evaluate the performance of our proposed test. The application of our test is further demonstrated on an ecological dataset.
Key words and phrases: Mixture model, species richness, zero-inflated Poisson.