Three metrics of species diversity – species richness, the Shannon index and the Simpson index – are still widely used in ecology, despite decades of valid critiques leveled against them. Developing a robust diversity metric has been challenging because, unlike many variables ecologists measure, the diversity of a community often cannot be estimated in an unbiased way based on a random sample from that community. Over the past decade, ecologists have begun to incorporate two important tools for estimating diversity: coverage and Hill diversity. Coverage is a method for equalizing samples that is, on theoretical grounds, preferable to other commonly used methods such as equal‐effort sampling, or rarefying datasets to equal sample size. Hill diversity comprises a spectrum of diversity metrics and is based on three key insights. First, species richness and variants of the Shannon and Simpson indices are all special cases of one general equation. Second, richness, Shannon and Simpson can be expressed on the same scale and in units of species. Third, there is no way to eliminate the effect of relative abundance from estimates of any of these diversity metrics, including species richness. Rather, a researcher must choose the relative sensitivity of the metric towards rare and common species, a concept which we describe as ‘leverage.' In this paper we explain coverage and Hill diversity, provide guidelines for how to use them together to measure species diversity, and demonstrate their use with examples from our own data. We show why researchers will obtain more robust results when they estimate the Hill diversity of equal‐coverage samples, rather than using other methods such as equal‐effort sampling or traditional sample rarefaction.

中文翻译：

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衡量物种多样性的概念指南

尽管有数十年的有效批评，物种多样性的三个指标-物种丰富度，香农指数和辛普森指数-仍在生态学中被广泛使用。制定鲁棒的多样性指标具有挑战性，因为与生态学家测量的许多变量不同，社区的多样性通常无法基于该社区的随机样本以无偏见的方式进行估算。在过去的十年中，生态学家已开始采用两种重要的工具来估算多样性：覆盖率和丘陵多样性。覆盖率是一种用于均衡样本的方法，从理论上讲，它比其他常用方法（如同等努力的抽样或将数据集稀少到相等的样本大小）更可取。希尔多样性包括一系列多样性指标，并且基于三个关键见解。第一的，物种丰富度和香农指数和辛普森指数的变体都是一个通用方程式的特例。其次，丰富度，香农和辛普森可以以相同的规模和物种单位来表达。第三，无法从包括物种丰富度在内的任何这些多样性指标的估计中消除相对丰度的影响。相反，研究人员必须选择度量标准对稀有和常见物种的相对敏感性，我们将这种概念称为“杠杆”。在本文中，我们将解释覆盖率和Hill多样性，提供有关如何将它们一起用于测量物种多样性的指南，并通过我们自己的数据中的示例演示其用法。我们证明了为什么研究人员在估算等覆盖样本的希尔多样性时会获得更可靠的结果，