Ecologists are faced with an over-abundance of ways to measure biodiversity. I provide a compilation of and guide through this ticket of diversity metrics, including a typology for diversity metrics that encompasses the three commonly considered categories of information: abundance, phylogenetic relationships, and traits (i.e., function).
Results/Conclusions
I show how the 117 biodiversity metrics can be sorted into 7 simple types of information that can then be recombined in various ways to categorize them. I show how this categorization can lead to the identification of additional metrics, and how it can be used to insure that metric comparisons are done with ones that are based on related properties. I also propose a standard set of symbols for many of the metrics that makes their properties immediately obvious. The resulting compilation of diversity metrics will make it easier for researchers to identify the metric(s) most suited to their needs and will help guide future metric development.