I have a 27-year Mid-winter Waterfowl Survey Data (species list and abundances) for a lake and I want to compare the years and groups of years in terms of their avian diversity. The counts are semi-standardized (for practical purposes I will have to assume they are fully standardized). Which biodiversity indices should I use to compare years and groups of years in terms of their avian diversity?
P.S.: I cannot use R. I only use Excel for now but I have friends who are really good at R.
It is common practice to use Shannon or Simpson DI's. They are easy to calculate, even on a scientific calculator lol :)
Hi Kaan,
Let's be a bit clear here,annual interspecific (diversity in annual species pool), intraspecific (diversity in annual per species pool) or just a general species diversity for the entire period?You need to be direct in what you want to find out before thinking of methods.
You can use excel to plot the diversity graphs but you will need a statistical software to run a regression analysis or show correlations between your results and determinants of these results.
Goodluck
Thanks for your answers everyone! I will consider all your suggestions!
The above replies provide good responses and point out various ways to analize the data. You might want to look at and compare several simimlar means of analyses so as to support the results you get. Looked at another way, will the various means of analysis show parallel trends, thus reinforcing your findings.
Dear Kaan,
PAST software is very easy to use and it is for free.
To compare the diversity of rare species will be good the Shannon index, for abundant species the Simpson index. Much better if you use diversity profiles (in is PAST included).
Shannon, Simpson are alpha diversity indices, but you can use beta diversity indices (Sorensen, Bray-Curtis...).
For starters, you can use Shannon-Weiner's and Simpson's. Shannon-Weiner's shows you the likelihood of drawing an organism from the same species, while Simpson's shows the dominance of a species, indicating lower diversity. If your sampling was not completely random or biased, you may also use Brillouin's index. There many other diversity indices there, which could be useful to you as well, so I hope I'm able to help.
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