Scale considerations[edit]

The area or landscape of interest may be of very different sizes in different situations, and no
consensus has been reached on what spatial scales are appropriate to quantify gamma diversity.[2] It
has therefore been proposed that the definition of gamma diversity does not need to be tied to a
specific spatial scale, but gamma diversity can be measured for an existing dataset at any scale of
interest.[3] If results are extrapolated beyond the actual observations, it needs to be taken into
account that the species diversity in the dataset generally gives an underestimation of the species
diversity in a larger area. The smaller the available sample in relation to the area of interest, the
more species that actually exist in the area are not found in the sample.[4][5] The degree of
underestimation can be estimated from a species-area curve.

Different gamma diversity concepts[edit]

Researchers have used different ways to define diversity, which in practice has led to different
definitions of gamma diversity as well. Often researchers use the values given by one or
more diversity indices, such as species richness, the Shannon index or the Simpson
index.[1][6][7] However, it has been argued that it would be better to use the effective number of species
as the universal measure of species diversity. This measure allows weighting rare and abundant
species in different ways, just as the diversity indices collectively do, but its meaning is intuitively
easier to understand. The effective number of species is the number of equally abundant species
needed to obtain the same mean proportional species abundance as that observed in the dataset of
interest (where all species may not be equally abundant).[3][8][9][10][11][12]