Different Alpha Diversity Concepts
Ecologists have used several slightly different definitions of alpha diversity. Whittaker himself used the term both for the species diversity in a single subunit and for the mean species diversity in a collection of subunits. It has been argued that defining alpha diversity as a mean across all relevant subunits is preferable, because it agrees better with Whittaker's idea that total species diversity consists of alpha and beta components.
Definitions of alpha diversity can also differ in what they assume diversity to be. Often researchers use the values given by one or more diversity indices, such as species richness, the Shannon index or the Simpson index. However, it has been argued that it would be better to use the effective number of species as the universal measure of species diversity. This measure allows weighting rare and abundant species in different ways, just as the diversity indices collectively do, but its meaning is intuitively easier to understand. The effective number of species is the number of equally-abundant species needed to obtain the same mean proportional species abundance as that observed in the dataset of interest (where all species may not be equally abundant).
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