Generalization of the partitioning of shannon diversity

PLoS One. 2014 Mar 6;9(3):e90289. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0090289. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Traditional measures of diversity, namely the number of species as well as Simpson's and Shannon's indices, are particular cases of Tsallis entropy. Entropy decomposition, i.e. decomposing gamma entropy into alpha and beta components, has been previously derived in the literature. We propose a generalization of the additive decomposition of Shannon entropy applied to Tsallis entropy. We obtain a self-contained definition of beta entropy as the information gain brought by the knowledge of each community composition. We propose a correction of the estimation bias allowing to estimate alpha, beta and gamma entropy from the data and eventually convert them into true diversity. We advocate additive decomposition in complement of multiplicative partitioning to allow robust estimation of biodiversity.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Animals
  • Biodiversity*
  • Ecosystem*
  • Entropy
  • Environment
  • Models, Biological*
  • Population Density
  • Population Dynamics
  • Species Specificity

Grants and funding

This work has benefited from an “Investissement d'Avenir” grant managed by Agence Nationale de la Recherche (CEBA, ref. ANR-10-LABX-25-01). Funding came from the project Climfor (Fondation pour la Recherche sur la Biodiversité). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.