Biodiversity analysis: issues, concepts, techniques

The paper responds to the question: How should one go about designing the statistical analysis of biodiversity if it had to be done across scales in time and space? The conceptual basis of the design is the definition of biodiversity as a convolution of two community components. One of the components is richness, the product of species evolution, and the other structure, the consequence of environmental sorting (biotic, physical). The method of choice takes information in the manner of frequency distributions, and decomposes the associated total diversity into additive components specific to the deemed sorting factors. Diversity quantities are supplied by the analysis by which the relative importance of sorting factors can be measured and the dynamic oscillations which they generate in diversity can be traced. Examples support the a priori idea that the velocity of compositional change in the community during the late quaternary period has co-varied closely with the specific components of Kolmogorov-type complexity, Anand's structural complexity and Renyi's entropy of order one. The paper explains what is involved and why is it important.

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