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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not define ecological diversity as number of distinct biological species living in the area?
This is precisely the question answered by the OP. The answer is, "because there is a whole spectrum of things you might mean by 'diversity', of which 'number of distinct species' is only one extremum".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not define ecological diversity as number of distinct biological species living in the area?
This is precisely the question answered by the OP. The answer is, "because there is a whole spectrum of things you might mean by 'diversity', of which 'number of distinct species' is only one extremum".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is precisely the question answered by the OP. The answer is, "because there is a whole spectrum of things you might mean by 'diversity', of which 'number of distinct species' is only one extremum".
And also, I assume, because the concept of "species" isn't all that well defined?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is precisely the question answered by the OP. The answer is, "because there is a whole spectrum of things you might mean by 'diversity', of which 'number of distinct species' is only one extremum".
Does he provide an example of other definition of diversity that makes sense in biological context?
-edit- by the way, since it may not be obvious to everyone, the reason why an ecologist might care bout evenness is because extremely rare species are often not very important to the wider community. From an ecological function perspective, there is very little difference between my above example of the 99%/1% community and a community that is 100% species A. So an community with two, equally populous species might have more functional diversity than a community with one very abundant species and several more, very rare species.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also, I assume, because the concept of "species" isn't all that well defined?
It is well defined: a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also, I assume, because the concept of "species" isn't all that well defined?
It is well defined: a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And also, I assume, because the concept of "species" isn't all that well defined?
It is well defined: a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding
I am actually sympathetic to category theory, and the research at hand. That being said, what was presented might be interesting if left in terms of linear algebra or graph theory (both legitimate fields). Trying to put a category theory gloss on it just makes it look hollow.
Can someone tl;dr?
The first explains the problem of measuring ecological diversity, and the problem with old, traditional measures like Shannon entropy or Gini-Simpson index. The second introduces the species similarity matrix Z and the viewpoint parameter q.
https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~tl/riken/
Now you know how to measure the diversity of a given community.
But if you are given the number of species and their similarity matrix Z, and the viewpoint parameter q, if you get to design a community (decide the relative abundance of each species), how would you maximize the diversity? Which distribution of relative abundances will maximize the measured diversity? The posted talk gives the answer, and the surprising result that the answer does not depend on q.
The book that includes the results from these slides has broader scope, and also can be downloaded for free from arXiv: https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~tl/ed/ "The starting point is the connection between diversity and entropy. We will discover: • how Shannon entropy, originally defined for communications engineering, can also be understood through biological diversity (Chapter 2); • how deformations of Shannon entropy e…
Why not define ecological diversity as number of distinct biological species living in the area?