Given the importance value index and others as Shannon, Simpson etc, used since the last century, they have become ambiguous and sketchy for information about tropical plant resources in the region, especially in functional aspects. For this reason I want to know through you, what methods are being used in other tropical ecositemas to analyze data from research and evaluate diversity, richness and structure in tropical forests and agroecosystems.
Best regards
Hi,
See first paragraph in the data analysis in Maracahipes Santos et al. 2015 (Diversity, floristic composition, and structure of the woody vegetation of the Cerrado in the Cerrado–Amazon transition zone in Mato Grosso, Brazil). Maybe this can help you, I recommend Melo 2008 (O que ganhamos ‘‘confundindo’’ riqueza de espécies e equabilidade em um ı ´ndice de diversidade?).
Sorry if did not help!
Hi Oswaldo
What I can share with you is that the use of diversity indices is sometimes uncritical. Many students choose to follow the fashion of using either index, without stopping to analyze their research objectives. Today there are numerous texts about the assumptions of each index, the type of data required and even ecological interpretation. If you are familiar with using the R program, you can find multiple routines for the diversity indices, such as vegan, biodiversityR and others. You can follow a lot of argument downloading vegan library written by Oksanen (2013) or biodiversityR library written by Kind(2015)
By calculating diversity index value which indicate the richness of species in a ecosystem. Thank You.
Please consult as an example this two paper, they contain several diversity indices, you can compare between them for your context.
Hubálek Z. 2000. Measures of species diversity in ecology: an evaluation. Review article. Folia Zool. N. 49(4), n. 241–260.
BEISEL et al. 2003. A Comparative Analysis of Evenness Index Sensitivity. Internat. Rev. Hydrobio 88.(1), 3-15.
I like sampling with plots and using rarefaction and the non parametric richness estimators to compare data. You could rarefy and extrapolate your data from forest and agroecosystem separately using EstimateS (http://viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/estimates/) and then plot both data together. You will see graphically the differences.
Article Rarefaction, richness estimation and extrapolation methods i...
See the paper by: Fleixhman E., Noss R.F, Noon B.R. Utility and limitations of species richness metrics for conservation planning. Ecological Indicators 6 (2006) 543-553.
I find it particularly useful to remind us that it all depends on the goal of the research. I find it useful to understand an ecosystem (seminatural or agroecosystem) the distribution of species richness and abundance over functional or structural groups, like endemic species, exotic species, threatened species, forest dependet species, edge species, canopy species, shrub species, and so on.
Good luck,
Hello! Hanna Tuomisto has done a lot of work about richness and diversity of Amazonian plants. For the basic terminology, see this one:
Tuomisto, H., 2013. Defining, Measuring, and Partitioning Species Diversity, in: Encyclopedia of Biodiversity. Elsevier, pp. 434–446.
A practical application in Amazonia:
Tuomisto, H., Zuquim, G., Cárdenas, G., 2014. Species richness and diversity along edaphic and climatic gradients in Amazonia. Ecography 37, 1034–1046. doi:10.1111/ecog.00770
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