I have the data of every avian species I saw at 38 study sites within one month, to calculate the biodiversity of each study site should I use Simpsons index or Shannons Index? or another one?
It depends on what your questions are. However, I typically recommend Hill Numbers to my students.
Hill Numbers are a mathematically unified family of diversity indices. Other indices, such as Simpson's and Shannon's, aren't actually indices; they are entropies.
Hill 0 is the richness (number of species)
Hill 1 is the (exponential) Shannon entropy (number of common species)
Hill 2 is the inverse Simpson index (number of very common species)
Hills numbers are often better to use than most diversity indices. The advantages of using Hills numbers are:
I recommend reading Jost 2007 https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1890/06-1736.1?casa_token=74R_SGGUlMcAAAAA:DTO72vucMzgVXmYO2tQHIldSxO4CIYCA80FnNsvWe0uTD7vGaNLEk2vvtLGi8-JGFQaG7Tzy494lk-Ks
You can simply use number species at each site compared with total number of species observed across all the sites :)
Chao et al 2014 use Hill numbers for alpha diversityArticle Rarefaction and extrapolation with Hill numbers: A framework...
You must use Simpson Index. It is OK and it is the best because it is simple for using.
You can use the EstimateS or PAST.4 software and calculate Chao 2 or Jackknife 2 estimated species numbers.
Take a look at Hill numbers. There's plenty of literature advising it's use.
It all depends on what you want to express. It could be as simple as the number of species; it could be a comparison on the shared species (Qualitative, Jaccard or Sorensen Indexes) or the abundance of the species detected in each site (Quantitative, Morisita-Horn), or Hill numbers for example.
In other words, kit depends on the research question or the purpose of your quest.
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