Bridging the gap between ecological diversity indices and measures of biodiversity with Shannon's entropy: comment to Izsák and Papp

Abstract

Most ecological diversity indices summarize the information about the relative abundances of community species without reflecting taxonomic differences between species. Nevertheless, in the environmental conservation practice, data on species abundances are generally unknown. In such cases, to summarize the conservation value of a given site, so-called ‘biological diversity’ measures need to be used. Most of these measures are based on taxonomic relations among species and ignore species relative abundances. In a recent paper, Izsák and Papp suggest that the quadratic entropy index ( Q) is the only diversity index used to date in the ecological practice that incorporates both species relative abundances and a measure of the pairwise taxonomic differences between species in the analyzed data set. I show here that a number of traditional ecological diversity measures can be generalized to take into account a taxonomic weighting factor. Since these new indices violate part of the mathematical properties that an index should meet to be termed an ecological diversity index, I defined this new family of indices ‘weak diversity indices’.