What do we mean by diversity? The path towards quantification
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7203/metode.9.11472Keywords:
diversity, effective number of species, Shannon entropy, species richnessAbstract
The concept of biological diversity has evolved from a simple count of species to more sophisticated measures that are sensitive to relative abundances and even to evolutionary divergence times between species. In the course of this evolution, diversity measures have often been borrowed from other disciplines. Biological reasoning about diversity often implicitly assumed that measures of diversity had certain mathematical properties, but most of biology’s traditional diversity measures did not actually possess these properties, a situation which often led to mathematically and biologically invalid inferences. Biologists now usually transform the traditional measures to the «effective number of species», whose mathematics does support most of the rules of inference that biologists apply to them. The effective number of species, then, seems to capture most (though not all) of what biologists mean by diversity.
Downloads
References
Chao, A. (1984). Nonparametric estimation of the number of classes in a population. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 11(4), 265–270.
Chao, A., Chiu, C. H., & Jost, L. (2010). Phylogenetic diversity measures based on Hill numbers. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, 365(1558), 3599–3609. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0272
Chao, A., Chiu, C. H., & Jost, L. (2014). Unifying species diversity, phylogenetic diversity, functional diversity, and related similarity and differentiation measures through Hill numbers. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 45(1), 297–324. doi: 10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-120213-091540
Chao, A., Jost, L., Hsieh, T. C., Ma, K. H., Sherwin, W., & Rollins, L. A. (2015). Expected Shannon entropy and Shannon differentiation between subpopulations for neutral genes under the finite island model. PLOS ONE, 10(6), e0125471. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0125471
DeVries, P. J., & Walla, T. R. (2001). Species diversity and community structure in neotropical fruit-feeding butterflies. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 74(1), 1–15. doi: 10.1006/bijl.2001.0571
Hannah, L., & Kay, J. A. (1977). Concentration in modern industry. Theory, measurement and the UK experience. London: Macmillan.
Hill, M. (1973). Diversity and evenness: A unifying notation and its consequences. Ecology, 54, 427–432. doi: 10.2307/1934352
Hubbell, S. P. (2001). A unified theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jost, L. (2006). Entropy and diversity. Oikos, 113(2), 363–375. doi: 10.1111/j.2006.0030-1299.14714.x
Jost, L. (2007). Partitioning diversity into independent alpha and beta components. Ecology, 88(10), 2427–2439. doi: 10.1890/06-1736.1
Jost, L. (2010). The relation between evenness and diversity. Diversity, 2(2), 207–232. doi: 10.3390/d2020207
Jost, L., DeVries, P. J., Walla, T., Greeney, H., Chao, A., & Ricotta, C. (2010). Partitioning diversity for conservation analyses. Diversity and Distributions, 16(1), 65–76. doi: 10.1111/j.1472-4642.2009.00626.x
Lande, R. (1996). Statistics and partitioning of species diversity and similarity among multiple communities. Oikos, 76(1), 5–13. doi: 10.2307/3545743
Moreno, C. E., Barragán, F., Pineda, E., & Pavón, N. P. (2011). Reanálisis de la diversidad alfa: Alternativas para interpretar y comparar información sobre comunidades ecológicas. Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad, 82(4), 1249–1261. doi: 10.22201/ib.20078706e.2011.4.745
Rényi, A. (1961). On measures of information and entropy. In J. Neyman (Ed.), Proceedings of the fourth Berkeley Symposium on Mathematics, Statistics and Probability 1960(pp. 547–561). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Shannon, C. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), 379–423. doi: 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x
Tsallis, C. (1988). Possible generalization of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics. Journal of Statistical Physics, 52, 479–487.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
-
Abstract3386
-
PDF1518
Issue
Section
License
All the documents in the OJS platform are open access and property of their respective authors.
Authors publishing in the journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors keep the rights and guarantee Metode Science Studies Journal the right to be the first publication of the document, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of authorship and publication in the journal.
- Authors are allowed and encouraged to spread their work through electronic means using personal or institutional websites (institutional open archives, personal websites or professional and academic networks profiles) once the text has been published.