Diversity from genes to ecosystems: A unifying framework to study variation across biological metrics and scales

Evolutionary Applications
Oscar E GaggiottiKimberly A Selkoe

Abstract

Biological diversity is a key concept in the life sciences and plays a fundamental role in many ecological and evolutionary processes. Although biodiversity is inherently a hierarchical concept covering different levels of organization (genes, population, species, ecological communities and ecosystems), a diversity index that behaves consistently across these different levels has so far been lacking, hindering the development of truly integrative biodiversity studies. To fill this important knowledge gap, we present a unifying framework for the measurement of biodiversity across hierarchical levels of organization. Our weighted, information-based decomposition framework is based on a Hill number of order q = 1, which weights all elements in proportion to their frequency and leads to diversity measures based on Shannon's entropy. We investigated the numerical behaviour of our approach with simulations and showed that it can accurately describe complex spatial hierarchical structures. To demonstrate the intuitive and straightforward interpretation of our diversity measures in terms of effective number of components (alleles, species, etc.), we applied the framework to a real data set on coral reef biodiversity. We expect our fram...Continue Reading

References

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Citations

Apr 5, 2019·Molecular Ecology Resources·Antton Alberdi, M Thomas P Gilbert
Jul 22, 2018·Evolutionary Applications·Lou JostEmily Latch
Apr 4, 2020·Scientific Reports·Zhanshan Sam MaYa-Ping Zhang
Jul 22, 2018·Evolutionary Applications·Margaret E HunterLouis Bernatchez
Aug 20, 2021·Nature Reviews. Genetics·Deborah M LeighIvan Paz-Vinas
Aug 11, 2021·Molecular Biology and Evolution·Gemma PalomarWiesław Babik
Sep 30, 2021·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Giulia Francesca Azzurra DonatiLoïc Pellissier

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Software Mentioned

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