title: Parametric scaling from species relative abundances to absolute abundances in the computation of biological diversity: a first proposal using Shannon's entropy.
abstract: 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 abundances. 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 Shannon's entropy and total information content as special cases of this more general function.
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant Biology, University of Rome La Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy. carlo.ricotta@uniroma1.it
authors.forename: Carlo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ricotta
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D017753:Ecosystem; D019277:Entropy; D017709:Fractals; D008954:Models, Biological; D018521:Plant Physiological Phenomena; D010944:Plants / Q000145:classification; D013045:Species Specificity