Classifying degrees of species commonness: North Sea fish as a case study

Abstract

Species commonness is often related to abundance and species conservation status. Intuitively, a "common species" is a species that is abundant in a certain area, widespread and at low risk of extinction. Analysing and classifying species commonness can help discovering indicators of ecosystem status and can prevent sudden changes in biodiversity. However, it is challenging to quantitatively define this concept. This paper presents a procedure to automatically characterize species commonness from biological surveys.