Nature favours “one” as the leading digit in phytoplankton abundance data

Abstract Benford’s Law predicts the probability of the occurrence of leading digits and shows the first significant digit of many number series is more often 1 than any other of the digits between 1 and 9. Patterns of leading digits in multispecies phytoplankton communities utilising long-term records of phytoplankton abundance values in five lakes was studied. Phytoplankton abundance conformed to the law in individual lakes and when all datasets were combined. Opportunities for exploiting this finding include its use as a data quality control tool in large ecological data repositories, testing realism of ecological experiments and evaluating reasonableness of mathematical aquatic ecosystem models.