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Diversity measurement is based on three assumptions
1. All species are equal: this means that richness measurement makes no
distinctions amongst species and threat the species that are exceptionally
abundant in the same way as those that are extremely rare species. The relative
abundance of species in an assemblage is the only factor that determines its
importance in a diversity measure.
2. All individuals are equal: this means that there is no distinction between the
largest and the smallest individual, in practice however the smallest animals can
often escape for example by sampling with nets.
Taxonomic and functional diversity measures, however, do not necessarily treat
all species and individuals as equal.
3. Species abundance has been recorded in using appropriate and comparable
units. It is clearly unwise to use different types of abundance measure, such as
the number of individuals and the biomass, in the same investigation. Diversity
estimates based on different units are not directly comparable.
Diversity measures
Species richness indices
Where N = the total number of individuals in the sample and S = the number of
species recorded.
Despite the attempt to correct for sample size, both measures remain strongly
influenced by sampling effort. Nonetheless they are intuitively meaningful
indices and can play a useful role in investigations of biological diversity.
Heterogeneity measures
Heterogeneity measures are those that combine the richness and the evenness
component of diversity. Heterogeneity measures fall into two categories:
parametric indices, which are based on a parameter of a species abundance
model, and nonparametric indices, that make no assumptions about the
underlying distributions of species abundances.
Parametric indices
[5]
The log series index
(see also log-series distributions) is a
parameter of the log series model. The parameter is independent of
sample size. describes the way in which the individuals are divided among
the species, which is a measure of diversity. The attractive properties of
this diversity index are: it provides a good discrimination between sites, it
is not very sensitive to density fluctuations and it is normally distributed,
in this way confidence limits can be attached to
.
,...,
And
Non-parametric indices
The first two indices are based on information theory. These indices are based on
the rationale that the diversity in a natural system can be measured in a similar
way to the information contained in a code or message.
The most widely used diversity index in the ecological literature is the
Shannon-Wiener diversity index.[6] [7]
In which
and
the number of individuals in species i
and N is the total number of individuals in the community.
One of the best known and earliest evenness measures is the Simpson s
index[9] which is given by:
is the proportion of individuals found in the ith species This index is used for
large, sampled communities. Simpsons index expresses the probability that any
two individuals drawn at random from an infinitely large community belong to
the same species.
where
= the proportional abundance of species i in the sample and a = the
order in which the index is dependent of rare species.
The most known are
Taxonomic indices
If two data-sets have identical numbers of species and equivalent patterns of
species abundance, but differ in the diversity of taxa to which the species
belong, it seems intuitively appropriate that the most taxonomically varied dataset is the more diverse. As long as the phylogeny of the data-set of interest is
reasonably well resolved, measures of taxonomic diversity are possible.
=
Taxonomic distinctness (*) is the average path length between two randomly
chosen but taxonomically different organisms. This measure is measure of pure
taxonomic relatedness.
*=
When only presence/absence data is considered both and * converge to the
same statistic +, which can be seen as the average taxonomic path length
between any two randomly chosen species. [12]
+=
Functional diversity
The positive relationship between ecosystem functioning and species richness is
often attributed to the greater number of functional groups found in richer
assemblages. Petchey and Gaston [13] proposed a method for quantifying
functional diversity. It is based on total branch length of a dendrogram, which is
constructed from species trait values. One important consideration is that only
those traits linked to the ecosystem process of interest are used. Thus a study
In this model a limiting resource is compared with a stick, broken in S parts at S1 randomly located points. The length of the parts is taken as representative for
the density of the S species subdividing the limiting resource. If the species are
ranked according to abundance, the expected abundance of species i, Ni is given
by:
With S(R) = the number of the species in the Rth octave to the right, and to the
left of the symmetric curve; S0 = the number of the species in the modal octave;
and
References
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283. Categories: