Towards a unifying approach to diversity measures: Bridging the gap between the Shannon entropy and Rao's quadratic index

The diversity of a species assemblage has been studied extensively for many decades in relation to its possible connection with ecosystem functioning and organization. In this view most diversity measures, such as Shannon’s entropy, rely upon information theory as a basis for the quantification of diversity. Also, traditional diversity measures are computed using species relative abundances and cannot account for the ecological differences between species. Rao first proposed a diversity index, termed quadratic diversity (Q) that incorporates both species relative abundances and pairwise distances between species. Quadratic diversity is traditionally defined as the expected distance between two randomly selected individuals. In this paper, we show that quadratic diversity can be interpreted as the expected conflict among the species of a given assemblage. From this unusual interpretation, it naturally follows that Rao’s Q can be related to the Shannon entropy through a generalized version of the Tsallis parametric entropy.