A simple and viable approach to estimate population trends
Changes in population abundances over time are of central concern for environmental conservation and the understanding of population dynamics. The standard slope estimator has restricting assumptions and lacks a constant range, which makes its interpretation less intuitive. Herein, more robust measures of trend. It is based on proportional difference and can be used for data on various scale types. If it is applied to ranks it yields the correlation coefficient. Related measures of association are described that assess the relationship between species, including a rank-order correlation that is sensitive to top ranks and a correlation for continuous data that is more robust than the correlation coefficient. All proposed measures have a range between -1 and +1. Furthermore, they can provide a common ground for evaluating trend strength and strength of association for populations undergoing very different dynamics.