Biodiversity can be represented by different dimensions. While many diversity metrics try to capture the variation of these dimensions they also lead to a ‘fragmentation’ of the concept of biodiversity itself. Developing a unified measure that integrates all the dimensions of biodiversity is a theoretical solution for this problem, however, it remains operationally impossible. Alternatively, understanding which dimensions better represent the biodiversity of a set of communities can be a reliable way to integrate the different diversity metrics. Therefore, to achieve a holistic understand of biological diversity, we explore the concept of dimensionality. We define dimensionality of diversity as the number of complementary components of biodiversity, represented by diversity metrics, needed to describe biodiversity in an unambiguously and effective way. We provide a solution that joins two components of dimensionality – correlation and the variation – operationalized through two metrics, respectively: evenness of eigenvalues (EE) and importance values (IV). Through simulation we show that considering EE and IV together can provide information that is neglected when only EE is considered. We demonstrate how to apply this framework by investigating the dimensionality of South American small mammal communities. Our example evidenced that, for some representations of biological diversity, more attention is needed in the choice of diversity metrics necessary to effectively characterize biodiversity. We conclude by highlighting that this integrated framework provides a better understanding of dimensionality than considering only the correlation component.

中文翻译：

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重新审视生物多样性的维度

生物多样性可以用不同的维度来表示。虽然许多多样性指标试图捕捉这些维度的变化，但它们也导致生物多样性本身概念的“碎片化”。制定一个整合生物多样性所有方面的统一措施是解决这个问题的理论方法，但是，它在操作上仍然是不可能的。或者，了解哪些维度更好地代表了一组群落的生物多样性，可能是整合不同多样性指标的可靠方法。因此，为了全面了解生物多样性，我们探索了维度的概念。我们将多样性的维度定义为生物多样性互补成分的数量，由多样性指标表示，需要以明确有效的方式描述生物多样性。我们提供了一种解决方案，该解决方案将维度的两个组成部分——相关性和变化——分别通过两个指标进行操作：特征值的均匀性 (EE) 和重要性值 (IV)。通过模拟，我们表明同时考虑 EE 和 IV 可以提供仅考虑 EE 时被忽略的信息。我们通过调查南美小型哺乳动物群落的维度来展示如何应用这个框架。我们的例子证明，对于生物多样性的某些表示，需要更多关注选择有效表征生物多样性所必需的多样性指标。