Application of Diversity Index in Measurement of Species Diversity

Abstract

Diversity index is a static measure for local members and consists of various types of objects. It is used to measure the local members of a set, and many fields can be studied to evaluate the diversity of any population. For instance, it is used in ecology to measure biodiversity in an ecosystem, in demography to measure the distribution of population of various demographic groups, in economics to measure the distribution over sectors of economic activity in a region and in information science to describe the complexity of a set of information. There are many income inequality indices such as Gini index, Theil index, Hoover index, Robin Hood index, Atkinson index, Suits index and generalised entropy index, that increase as diversity decreases, so that they can be used to measure diversity if it is understood that a smaller value represents higher diversity. The values of these indices can be viewed as representing a lack of diversity (isolation or segregation), redundancy, inequality, non-randomness or compressibility in the data.