摘要
A sequence of jackknife estimators is developed to estimate the number of shared species in two communities. The estimators have simple and explicit formulae. A sequential testing criterion is also developed to determine a proper order for these jackknife estimators. The performance of the estimators is evaluated using empirical data on two forests from Malaysia, where 209 shared species present in both forests, and using simulated data. Results for the empirical data and simulated scenarios (for sampling fraction ranging from 0.5 to 20 %) show that the jackknife estimator, compared with other existing estimators, has a smaller bias and provides more reliable interval estimation in most cases. Additionally, two avian datasets from Taiwan and Hong Kong are used to demonstrate the proposed method. To extend the proposed method to three communities, we also list the first six orders of the jackknife estimators explicitly.