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Measuring biological diversity

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Abstract

The diversity of a set of species refers to the joint dissimilarity of the species in the set. This paper discusses the measurement of diversity from the set of pairwise distances between the species in the set. A measure called the effective number of species is developed from a non-parametric probability inequality and is shown to have a simple interpretation in terms of comparing linear experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marine Policy Center, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 02543, Woods Hole, MA, USA

    Andrew R. Solow

  2. Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Oregon State University, 97331-3601, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Stephen Polasky

Authors
  1. Andrew R. Solow
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  2. Stephen Polasky
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Solow, A.R., Polasky, S. Measuring biological diversity. Environ Ecol Stat 1, 95–103 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02426650

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02426650

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