It is okay to be average when quantifying rangeland dynamics Comment on: Easdale, M.H & Bruzzone, O. 2015: Anchored in 'average thinking' in studies of arid rangeland dynamics - The need for a step forward from traditional measures of variability. J. Arid

IRISARRI, J.G.N.; TEXEIRA, MA; JUSTIN L. REEVES

JOURNAL OF ARID ENVIRONMENTS

ACADEMIC PRESS LTD-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2016 vol. 124 p. 10 - 12

0140-1963

Easdale and Bruzzone (2015) recently indicated that to bettercapture temporal patterns of rangeland dynamics, there is a needto move forward from simple measures of variability such asmean, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation (CV). Theynote that this is especially true in cases where long time seriesare available (e.g., ten or more years at a monthly resolution), aswith remotely sensed data. To support this viewpoint, Easdaleand Bruzzone (2015) presented multiple simulated time seriesdatasets that had same mean and standard deviation, but differentseasonal patterns. These seasonal pattern differences were onlycaptured using Fourier analysis (i.e., power spectrum analysis,Chatfield, 1996), highlighting the utility of the method. Here, however,we show the opposite phenomenon, where multiple datasetscan show similar temporal patterns from Fourier analysis, but havedifferent and meaningful means, standard deviations, and CVs.