Siliceous and Delicious

Finally forcing myself, on an overcast Sunday, to pick up the pieces, and grudgingly drag myself forwards. Item one: alpha volume per genus. This shows demonstrates my reasoning from before, that mean pairwise distance decreases through time because there’s more taxa crammed into a growing space, but the taxon-cramming exceeds the rate of space growth.

The largest alpha value is of course the same as the convex hull, and here we see the best correspondence with mean pairwise distance. Instead of mean pairwise distance, though, this is mean volume of morphospace occupied by each taxon. Which is about the same thing. The next question arising, then, is what does the mean volume occupied by a list, i.e. an ODP site, look like through time? This would be one way of looking past sampling issues and at least look at the disparity in one location through time.