What do we mean by diversity? The path towards quantification

Authors

  • Lou Jost Fundación EcoMinga (Ecuador).

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7203/metode.9.11472

Keywords:

diversity, effective number of species, Shannon entropy, species richness

Abstract

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.

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Author Biography

Lou Jost, Fundación EcoMinga (Ecuador).

Founding co-director of Fundación EcoMinga (Ecuador), which owns and protects ten Ecuadorian biodiversity hotspots. He also works as an orchid taxonomist (he has discovered more than sixty new species of orchids, along with several new amaryllids and tree species). His main interest is in developing the mathematics of diversity, and he has written or co-authored many papers on this subject in ecology, conservation biology, and genetics journals. He has been a visiting scholar at the Santa Fe Institute (USA), Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (Barcelona, Spain), and National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan).

References

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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

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Published

2019-03-06

How to Cite

Jost, L. (2019). What do we mean by diversity? The path towards quantification. Metode Science Studies Journal, (9), 55–61. https://doi.org/10.7203/metode.9.11472
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Issue

The grounds of science (2019)

Section

In praise of life. The dynamic concept of biodiversity

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