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On The Quantification Of Complexity And Diversity From Phenotypes To Ecosystems, Zachary Harrison Marion

Doctoral Dissertations

A cornerstone of ecology and evolution is comparing and explaining the complexity of natural systems, be they genomes, phenotypes, communities, or entire ecosystems. These comparisons and explanations then beget questions about how complexity should be quantified in theory and estimated in practice. Here I embrace diversity partitioning using Hill or effective numbers to move the empirical side of the field regarding the quantification of biological complexity.

First, at the level of phenotypes, I show that traditional multivariate analyses ignore individual complexity and provide relatively abstract representations of variation among individuals. I then suggest using well-known diversity indices from community ecology …