Measuring diversity: the importance of species similarity
2011/10/15 by Tom Leinster, Christina A. Cobbold · 47 citations
Environmental Science · Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies #Plant and animal studies #Species Distribution and Climate Change
paper · doi:10.1890/10-2402.1
Abstract
Realistic measures of biodiversity should reflect not only the relative abundances of species, but also the differences between them. We present a natural family of diversity measures taking both factors into account. This is not just another addition to the already long list of diversity indices. Instead, a single formula subsumes many of the most popular indices, including Shannon's, Simpson's, species richness, and Rao's quadratic entropy. These popular indices can then be used and understood in a unified way, and the relationships between them are made plain. The new measures are, moreover, effective numbers, so that percentage changes and ratio comparisons of diversity value are meaningful. We advocate the use of diversity profiles, which provide a faithful graphical representation of the shape of a community; they show how the perceived diversity changes as the emphasis shifts from rare to common species. Communities can usefully be compared by comparing their diversity profiles. We show by example that this is a far more subtle method than any relying on a single statistic. Some ecologists view diversity indices with suspicion, questioning whether they are biologically meaningful. By dropping the naive assumption that distinct species have nothing in common, working with effective numbers, and using diversity profiles, we arrive at a system of diversity measurement that should lay much of this suspicion to rest.
Cited by
- The units of biodiversity
- Quantifying compositional variability in microbial communities with FAVA
- Variance and Covariance of Distributions on Graphs
- Quantifying the complexity of trajectory ensembles with clustering-weighted multivariate multiscale sample entropy
- Species Interactions Determine the Importance of Response Diversity for Community Stability to Pulse Disturbances
- Accessibility: A Generalization of the Node Degree (A Tutorial)
- Measuring cultural and ethnic diversity in research and innovation
- Which Similarity-Sensitive Entropy?
- Reliable data clustering with Bayesian community detection
- Predict Training Data Quality via Its Geometry in Metric Space
- Applications of the Vendi score in genomic epidemiology
- Peeling metric spaces of strict negative type
- Areas of plant diversity—What do we know?
- The Winners Take It All? Global Evolutionary Success of H5Nx Reassortants in the 2020–2024 Panzootic
- SICs, the Stabilizer Polytope and Majorization
- Exploring interdisciplinarity of science projects based on the text mining
- Maximum diversity and weighting for invariants of periodic time series
- Quantum Theory as Symmetry Broken by Vitality
- sentropy: A Python Package for Revealing Hidden Differences in Complex Datasets
- The magnitude of metric spaces
- The use of spatial information in entropy measures
- Graph magnitude homology via algebraic Morse theory
- A survey of diversity quantification in natural language processing: The why, what, where and how
- Millimeter-scale patterns of phylogenetic and trait diversity in a salt marsh microbial mat. [europepmc]
- Abundance-weighted phylogenetic diversity measures distinguish microbial community states and are robust to sampling depth. [europepmc]
- Community transcriptomics reveals unexpected high microbial diversity in acidophilic biofilm communities. [europepmc]
- Choosing and using diversity indices: insights for ecological applications from the German Biodiversity Exploratories. [europepmc]
- Are different facets of plant diversity well protected against climate and land cover changes? A test study in the French Alps. [europepmc]
- A bioinformatic framework for immune repertoire diversity profiling enables detection of immunological status. [europepmc]
- Effects of species' similarity and dominance on the functional and phylogenetic structure of a plant meta-community. [europepmc]
- From species distributions to meta-communities. [europepmc]
- A guide to phylogenetic metrics for conservation, community ecology and macroecology. [europepmc]
- Diversity, Productivity, and Stability of an Industrial Microbial Ecosystem. [europepmc]
- N-dimensional hypervolumes to study stability of complex ecosystems. [europepmc]
- Functional, size and taxonomic diversity of fish along a depth gradient in the deep sea. [europepmc]
- Heritability of the Symbiodinium community in vertically- and horizontally-transmitting broadcast spawning corals. [europepmc]
- A Topological Representation of Branching Neuronal Morphologies. [europepmc]
- Unexpected mixed-mode transmission and moderate genetic regulation of Symbiodinium communities in a brooding coral. [europepmc]
- Transgenerational inheritance of shuffled symbiont communities in the coral Montipora digitata. [europepmc]
- The productivity-biodiversity relationship varies across diversity dimensions. [europepmc]
- Silhouette width using generalized mean-A flexible method for assessing clustering efficiency. [europepmc]
- The definition and measurement of heterogeneity. [europepmc]
- Management of Genetic Diversity in the Era of Genomics. [europepmc]
- Entropy, or Information, Unifies Ecology and Evolution and Beyond. [europepmc]
- PhenoGMM: Gaussian Mixture Modeling of Cytometry Data Quantifies Changes in Microbial Community Structure. [europepmc]
- Dimensions of invasiveness: Links between local abundance, geographic range size, and habitat breadth in Europe's alien and native floras. [europepmc]
- The evolution of trait variance creates a tension between species diversity and functional diversity. [europepmc]
- The role of microbial ecology in improving the performance of anaerobic digestion of sewage sludge. [europepmc]
Related