This topic has been broached in slightly different ways on RG in the past, but I am hoping to get insight from urban ecologists who have deployed different measures of biodiversity (specifically for USV) and the possible tradeoffs/benefits of each.

Previous studies suggest that there is no ideal way to measure biodiversity in any context, and the chosen method should align with the particular aims of the study.The Simpson’s Index of Diversity (SID) (Simpson 1949) has been used in other studies for assessing floral and fungal biodiversity in urban contexts (Luz de la Maza et al. 2002; Pushpa, Purushothama, et al 2012). SID has been suggested to be more robust when calculating the quantitative differences between multiple sampling sites (Morris et al. 2014; Magurran 2013). The SID requires a total count of individual species within the sampling site as well as the number of unique individuals for each of those species.

A related question would be: Should we work toward developing standardized measures to better enable cross-context comparison?

References:

Simpson, E. H. (1949). Measurement of diversity. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/163688a0

Luz de la Maza, C., Hernández, J., Bown, H., Rodríguez, M., & Escobedo, F. (2002). VEGETATION DIVERSITY IN THE SANTIAGO DE CHILE URBAN ECOSYSTEM. Arboricultural Journal, 26(4), 347–357.

Pushpa, H., Purushothama, K. B., & Others. (2012). Biodiversity of mushrooms in and around Bangalore (Karnataka), India. American-Eurasian Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences, 12(6), 750–759.

Morris, E. K., Caruso, T., Buscot, F., Fischer, M., Hancock, C., Maier, T. S., Meiners, T., Müller, C., Obermaier, E., Prati, D., Socher, S. A., Sonnemann, I., Wäschke, N., Wubet, T., Wurst, S., & Rillig, M. C. (2014). Choosing and using diversity indices: insights for ecological applications from the German Biodiversity Exploratories. Ecology and Evolution, 4(18), 3514–3524.

Magurran, A. E. (2013). Measuring Biological Diversity. John Wiley & Sons.