Biodiversity Indicators
A diversity index is a quantitative measure that reflects how many different types (such as species) there are in a dataset (a community), and simultaneously takes into account how evenly the basic entities (such as individuals) are distributed among those types.
When diversity indices are used in ecology, the types of interest are usually species, but they can also be other categories, such as genera, families, functional types or haplotypes. The entities of interest are usually individual plants or animals, and the measure of abundance can be, for example, number of individuals, biomass or coverage. In demography, the entities of interest can be people, and the types of interest various demographic groups. In information science, the entities can be characters and the types the different letters of the alphabet. The most commonly used diversity indices are simple transformations of the effective number of types (also known as 'true diversity'), but each diversity index can also be interpreted in its own right as a measure corresponding to some real phenomenon (but a different one for each diversity index).
True diversity, or the effective number of types, refers to the number of equally abundant types needed for the average proportional abundance of the types to equal that observed in the dataset of interest (where all types may not be equally abundant). The true diversity in a dataset is calculated by first taking the weighted generalized mean Mq−1 of the proportional abundances of the types in the dataset, and then taking the reciprocal of this. The equation is:
The denominator Mq−1 equals the average proportional abundance of the types in the dataset as calculated with the weighted generalized mean with exponent q-1. In the equation, R is richness (the total number of types in the dataset), and the proportional abundance of the ith type is pi. The proportional abundances themselves are used as the nominal weights. When q = 1, the above equation is undefined. However, the mathematical limit as q approaches 1 is well defined and the corresponding diversity is calculated with the following equation:
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