Abstract
Traditional diversity measures such as the Shannon entropy are generally computed from the species' relative abundance vector of a given community to the exclusion of species' absolute abundances. In this paper, I first mention some examples where the total information content associated with a given community may be more adequate than Shannon's average information content for a better understanding of ecosystem functioning. Next, I propose a parametric measure of statistical information that contains both Shannon's entropy and total information content as special cases of this more general function.
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Ricotta, C. Parametric Scaling from Species Relative Abundances to Absolute Abundances in the Computation of Biological Diversity: A First Proposal Using Shannon's Entropy. Acta Biotheor 51, 181–188 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025142106292
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025142106292