Different Gamma Diversity Concepts
Researchers have used different ways to define diversity, which in practice has led to different definitions of gamma diversity as well. Often researchers use the values given by one or more diversity indices, such as species richness, the Shannon index or the Simpson index. However, it has been argued that it would be better to use the effective number of species as the universal measure of species diversity. This measure allows weighting rare and abundant species in different ways, just as the diversity indices collectively do, but its meaning is intuitively easier to understand. The effective number of species is the number of equally-abundant species needed to obtain the same mean proportional species abundance as that observed in the dataset of interest (where all species may not be equally abundant).
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