Species and Biological Diversity - Choices of Diversity Indices and their Potential Consequences for Nature Conservation

Sammanfattning: As there currently are not so many known studies which directly evaluate how diversity indices have been used in different contexts, following literature study was made with the purpose of investigating how three of the most commonly used diversity indices (including Shannon-Wiener’s and Simpson’s Indices as well as a certain index measuring taxonomic diversity) are representing different categories of species in scientific reports and articles through an environmental scientific point of view. In order to find a possible explanation to the potential relations between the individual choice of diversity index as well as the substantial conservation of species and biological diversity in general, 50 reports and articles, which all had in common that they had species or biological diversity as their main topic as well as which included the use of any of the diversity indices chosen in this study, were randomly chosen through a single sample. While the results obtained from the following analysis of this study revealed Shannon-Wiener’s Index being the most commonly used one of the three indices, and that insects and other invertebrates are the most prominent types of totally eight identified groups of organisms, it is suggested that more data is still needed in further order to uncover how the use of those indices may have varied over a wider amount of time as well as how the within article-type distribution of the different indices may vary in articles about nature conservation in relation to other reports and articles treating other topics of ecology.