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Updated: Sep 20, 2026

Automatic Image Processing to Determine the Community Size Structure of Riverine Macroinvertebrates
Published on: January 13, 2023
Parametric scaling from species relative abundances to absolute abundances in the computation of biological
1Department of Plant Biology, University of Rome La Sapienza, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy. carlo.ricotta@uniroma1.it
Abstract:
Traditional diversity measures such as the Shannon entropy are generally computed from the species' relative abundance vector of a given community to the exclusion of species' absolute abundances. In this paper, I first mention some examples where the total information content associated with a given community may be more adequate than Shannon's average information content for a better understanding of ecosystem functioning. Next, I propose a parametric measure of statistical information that contains both Shannon's entropy and total information content as special cases of this more general function.
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