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Abstract

         Emerging concerns underline unprecedented pressures responsible for the biodiversity crisis on Earth. Understanding the extent to which contemporary biodiversity change occurs has thus been a central interest for ecological sciences and conservation management. While various indices have been developed and used to quantify the state of biodiversity, these indices can sometimes contradict each other. A missing piece here is a unified aspect that offers a cohesive implication over these diverse biodiversity measures.

         The talk begins by elaborating on the classical ecological concepts of biodiversity, namely alpha-, beta- and gamma-diversities, and provides a little formal interpretation based upon abundance distributions. We then show that a particular change in species abundance distributions corresponds to a specific type of biodiversity. This fact implies that quantifying a difference between two abundance distributions is equivalent to measuring the change in biodiversity; in other words, commonly used biodiversity indices are, in fact, an estimator of distributional deviation from one to another. We demonstrate how our framework encompasses the critical concepts in biodiversity study and provides more insight into the ecological community dynamics we observe.

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