Abstract

The UN promotes 2021–2030 as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, emphasising the urgent need to address the unprecedented impacts of human activities on global biodiversity and ecosystem changes. This critical period calls for a more integrated understanding of how biodiversity changes over time and across regions to inform effective restoration strategies. While numerous biodiversity indices have been proposed and studied to tackle the current challenge, they can sometimes yield conflicting results. A crucial challenge lies in the lack of a unified framework that clarifies what these indices measure and how they relate to the underlying ecological processes.

This talk revisits the foundational concepts of biodiversity, namely alpha-, beta- and gamma-diversity. We then show that the shift in species abundance distributions represents a fundamental form of biodiversity change. By incorporating Kullback-Leibler divergence and an information-theoretic approach, we introduce a cohesive framework that unites diverse biodiversity metrics under a common theoretical structure. Finally, we demonstrate how this approach can untangle observed biodiversity patterns, offering a more comprehensive understanding of the forces shaping ecosystem change.