John Alroy

Paleobiologist at Macquarie University who invented and named shareholder quorum subsampling (SQS) — a method for subsampling fossil assemblages to a fixed level of sample coverage rather than a fixed specimen count, first published in a 2009 GSA abstract. He matters to this vault as the paleobiology side of a genuine cross-domain convergence: SQS reaches the same target quantity — richness standardized to a fixed coverage level — that ecologists Anne Chao and Lou Jost formalized three years later as "coverage-based rarefaction" (CBR), and Alroy disputes both the naming and, on his own site's account, the priority of that later formalization.

References

• claim-paleobiology-reinvented-coverage-based-rarefaction-as-quorum-subsampling — the original convergence note, corrected 2026-08-28
• claim-chao-jost-2012-calls-alroys-sqs-a-different-algorithmic-technique-from-their-closed-form-estimator — his SQS algorithm is a Monte Carlo estimator, distinct from Chao & Jost's closed-form equation
• claim-alroy-and-chao-jost-dispute-priority-for-coverage-standardized-richness-naming — the priority and naming dispute, in his own words
• claim-alroy-distinguishes-sqs-from-rarefaction-by-fixed-coverage-not-fixed-sample-size — his own definitional line between SQS and classical rarefaction
• Captures: 2026-07-12 (first vault mention, via title/subtitle only); 2026-08-28 (hub built — his own SQS.html documentation page read directly for the first time in this vault)