Trends in the measurement of alpha diversity in the last two decades

recent interest in conservation biology has promoted the study of species diversity and the arising of new methods to measure it. we examined how alpha diversity was studied in articles published in two ecological journals from 1982 to 2002. we found 244 articles that measured alpha diversity, and the number of articles per year increased through time with a higher rate of increase after 1991, the most popular measure of diversity was species richness, but since 1994 the use of richness estimators increased. more papers have been devoted to the study of animals, but when they were grouped into vertebrates and invertebrates, these two groups included fewer articles than plants. for the three groups the number of articles increased through time. an increase was observed in both the number of articles written by authors working in north america and by authors from other regions; however, north american authors wrote the majority of papers. similarly, the number of studies carried out in north america and in other regions increased through time, but more studies were performed in north america and they increased at a higher rate.