Hello Ecolog, I'm aware of the use of nested quadrats to serve a couple of potential purposes when sampling a community. The approach records presence/absence of different species within differently sized quadrats (e.g., 1 m^2 nested within 10 m^2 nested within 100 m^2) at multiple locations within a site or study area. One application would be to generate species accumulation curves (e.g., estimate the number of species present at 1,000 m^2). Another application would be to ensure that a suitable quadrat size is available for estimating change in frequency over time or between sites. The rationale is that a common species should have frequency sampled on smaller quadrats (otherwise the data are all "present") and that rare species should be sampled on larger quadrats (otherwise the data are all "absent"). By using multiple quadrat sizes, it is more likely that most of the species will be sampled at an appropriate spatial scale.
My question is whether anyone is aware of an approach that uses the data for a given species from all of the quadrats to develop an index or estimate of abundance. Is there a theoretically sound way to use data collected at the different spatial scales? I'd appreciate any citations or approaches that list members could send my way. Thanks! Brian Mitchell National Park Service Southeast Region Inventory and Monitoring Division