Seminários Novos e Velhos Saberes recebem pesquisador da National Science Foundation dos EUA

O Dr. Samuel Scheiner, diretor da Divisão de Biologia Ambinetal da National Science Foundation dos Estados Unidos da América é nosso convidado, e fará uma palestra no dia 6 de julho, às 14h00, na sala 1 do Instituto de Biologia, intitulada “​Diversity Concepts and Metrics​”.

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Biological diversity can be measured for various characteristics of organisms, populations and species, including abundance, phylogenetic relationships, and ecological function. When individuals exist within a spatial hierarchy (e.g., communities within landscapes), we often want to partition that diversity within and among the subunits of that hierarchy. By convention, gamma diversity is that of the whole unit, alpha diversity is that of the subunits, and beta diversity is that among the subunits. When diversity is based on abundance and calculated as a Hill number, there is a well-defined method for doing this partitioning. Both gamma and alpha diversities are calculated from the data and beta diversity is calculated as: beta = gamma/alpha. This same method has been proposed for phylogenetic and functional diversities. However, applying that method to those types of data is incorrect. That method is incorrect because, unlike abundance data, phylogenetic and functional data are context dependent. Measurements within subunits are dependent on the identity and characteristics of individuals in other subunits. Because of this, the standard partition no longer holds. Instead of starting with measures of gamma and alpha diversity and deriving a measure of beta diversity, alpha and gamma diversity are calculated independently of beta diversity. I show, using artificial data, that the behavior of the diversity partition measured in this new way is more interpretable than that using the standard partition method.