How much percentage of a biogenic assemblage must be covered by a single species to declare it a monospecific assemblage? Does this value vary for living and fossil assemblages?
Dear Suman, I think apart of the methodology to clarify dominance in an specific assemblage, your question have some theory discussion. If you found an assemblage where a species is dominant you can not say that that assemblage is monospecific because you have other species. Even, if that species is 99.99% of the abundance is not monospecific because there are other species with the 0.01%. The only possibility to be an "monospecific assemblage" is when you only found one species and in that case I will not call that an assemblage is just a population of that species.
Dear Colleague,
have you read Magurran (2004) and Magurran and McGill (2011)? I think that in these books might be suggestions interesting for your topic.
However, I think that it is depend from the taxa under study (for example, among birds the 5% is the threshold in abundance to define a species as dominant in an assemblage). There are many approach to detect the level of dominance in an assemblage and their change under stress (see the diversity-dominance approaches, the curves of stress, the k-dominance plots, the Whittaker plots, the abundance/biomass curves etc.). If you want I have papers on this topic (see my profile).
These approaches may help you to detect minimum threshold to detect a dominated assemblage. However, I suppose that as define an assemblage dominated by only one species is a taxon-specific convention.
Have a nice job. Corrado
Dear Suman, I think apart of the methodology to clarify dominance in an specific assemblage, your question have some theory discussion. If you found an assemblage where a species is dominant you can not say that that assemblage is monospecific because you have other species. Even, if that species is 99.99% of the abundance is not monospecific because there are other species with the 0.01%. The only possibility to be an "monospecific assemblage" is when you only found one species and in that case I will not call that an assemblage is just a population of that species.
Dear Suman,
consider an assemblage as monospecific if it is the only species present in the study area. However, you may call the species "monodominant" if it is contributing to more than 50% of its cover or biomass, whatever you have used as measure of abundance.
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