Unifying and distinguishing diversity ordering methods for comparing communities

Abstract

Diversity indices have been widely used in ecological research, but they remain problematic in that different indices may rank communities inconsistently. This problem can be solved by using diversity ordering methods, the output of which is a diversity profile in graphical form for each community being compared. In this paper, we demonstrate that existing diversity ordering methods can be classified into four groups and that within-group methods are essentially equivalent, while among-group methods are not. We find that the intrinsic diversity-related methods - i.e., the group containing the right tail-sum method, the logarithmic dominance plot, the majorization method, and the k-dominance plot - provide the most stringent test of diversity ordering, and we recommend the right tail-sum method as the method of preference for practical purposes.