Partitioning is new method in a recent decades that rapidly used for study of diversity components in different spatial scales. Much research related to diversity have been conducted using these two methods. But so far, no one who has rejected its clearly one of them. In your view, which of these two methods is more suitable for studies of plants species diversity components at different scales?
As I said in another post on the same subject, Is this question really relevant? We have been discussing for at least two generations of scientists on that. Once you got a measure of "taxonomic diversity" as you do it, what are you going to do? Can you effectively use it no matter the index you adopt and for what? Species richness, the number of different species in an ecosystem, as well as alpha, beta and gamma diversity was for a long time the predominant measure of global biodiversity. This is now changing rapidly (see a recently published paper in Nature http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7468/full/nature12529.html) as researchers are realizing that rather than considering the sheer number of species, it is which specific species that are present that is crucial for ecological functions underpinning the provision of ecosystem services. In addition, as Joseph Veech said
neither additive nor multiplicative DP give statistically independent alpha and beta (see Veech and Crist 2010 papers in Ecology and others in the series).
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