TRENDS IN THE MEASUREMENT OF ALPHA DIVERSITY IN THE LAST TWO DECADES

Recent interest in conservation biology has promoted thestudy of species diversity and the arising of new methods tomeasure it. We examined how alpha diversity was studied inarticles published in two ecological journals from 1982 to2002. We found 244 articles that measured alpha diversity, andthe number of articles per year increased through time with ahigher rate of increase after 1991, The most popular measureof diversity was species richness, but since 1994 the use ofrichness estimators increased. More papers have been devotedto the study of animals, but when they were grouped into vertebratesand invertebrates, these two groups included fewer articlesthan plants. For the three groups the number of articlesincreased through time. An increase was observed in both thenumber of articles written by authors working in NorthAmerica and by authors from other regions; however, NorthAmerican authors wrote the majority of papers. Similarly, thenumber of studies carried out in North America and in otherregions increased through time, but more studies were performedin North America and they increased at a higher rate.