Parametric Scaling from Species Relative Abundances to Absolute Abundances in the Computation of Biological Diversity: A first Proposal Using Shannon's Entropy

摘要

Traditional diversity measures such as the Shannon entropy are generally computed from the species' relative abundance vector of a given community to the exclusion of species' absolute abundance. In this paper, I first mention some examples where the total information content associated with a given community may be more adequate than Shannon's average information content for a better understanding of ecosystem functioning. Next, I propose a parametric measure of statistical information that contains both shanon's entropy and total information content as special cases of this more general function.