FIGURE 3. Rank–occupancy curve.
From the following article:
Neutral metacommunity models predict fish diversity patterns in Mississippi–Missouri basin
Rachata Muneepeerakul, Enrico Bertuzzo, Heather J. Lynch, William F. Fagan, Andrea Rinaldo & Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe
Nature 453, 220-222(8 May 2008)
doi:10.1038/nature06813
The squares (which are densely placed and appear as grey stripes) represent the data and the line represents the model result. Here, the occupancy of a freshwater fish species is simply the number of DTAs in which that species is reported as present. Note that the straight-line character in the semilogarithmic scale is shared by the familiar rank–abundance curves predicted by the neutral theory of biodiversity6, 9, 16.