YUE Tian-xiang

(State Key Laboratory for Resources and Environmental Information System; Institute of Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China)

Abstract: By analyzing 27 models for biological diversity that have been published since 1949, it is found out that most of the models are not theoretically complete. For instance, the widely used Shannon model has at least 4 drawbacks: (a) it does not give a consideration of the differences of biomass among various species; (b) individuals of every species or the number of ecotopes of every ecotope type must be more than 100 if the Shannon model is used; (c) the parameter of area is not implied in the Shannon model; and (d) Shannon model can not express the¡®richness' property of diversity. Therefor, we introduced the theoretically complete models for biodiversity, in which some parameters are modified in order to satisfy the requirement of operating these models in different situations and of studying the similarity of the biodiversity.

Keywords: diversity; richness;evenness; model