Biodiversity across scales: quantifying inventory plankton diversity by hierarchical measures derived from the Kullback-Leibler divergence

Intrinsic feature of ecological systems is a high spatial complexity, which results from environmental heterogeneity and interactions among organisms. Therefore, the analysis of the patterns at different spatial/ecological scales constitutes a key step for characterising ecosystem structure, as well as for identifying the underlying mechanisms that determine it. This type of analysis requires dedicated sampling designs and statistical tools capable of extracting information from series of biological data, which are typically multivariate and not continuous. A wide range of indices of diversity and similarity measures is available for quantifying the diversity of natural communities based on abundance data. However, most of the available statistical tools work on single hierarchical levels of biodiversity, not allowing a coherent analysis of the hierarchical structure of biodiversity across spatial/ecological scales. Information theory provides theoretical basis and statistical tools suitable to address this issue. In this contribution, we propose a hierarchical and coherent set of measures derived from the Kullback-Leibler divergence, as a tool for analysing biodiversity at different spatial scales, and present the results of its application in the analysis of plankton spatial data.