Hunting affects a considerably greater area of the tropical forest biome than deforestation and logging combined. Often even large remote protected areas are depleted of a substantial proportion of their vertebrate fauna. However, understanding of the long‐term ecological consequences of defaunation in tropical forests remains poor. Using tree census data from a large‐scale plot monitored over a 15‐year period since the approx...

The pattern of species abundances is central to ecology. But direct measurements of species abundances at ecologically relevant scales are typically unfeasible. This limitation has motivated a long‐standing interest in the relationship between the abundance distribution in a large, regional community and the distribution observed in a small sample from the community. Here, we develop a statistical sampling theory to describe h...