Table 2. Deviance criteria for the five types of model fitted to rank abundance distributions.

Placement	Season	Deviance criterion by model a
		Null	Pre-emption	Lognormal	Zipf	Zipf-Mandelbrot
Random	Dry	23.8	4.9	1.1	8.0	4.6
	Wet	38.6	7.1	3.4	7.4	4.2
Trail	Dry	14.2	6.8	2.2	5.2	4.2
	Wet	23.2	6.2	2.3	4.4	2.8

^aThe deviance criterion is defined as the minimisation of sum of squares of deviations from predicted and observed values.