Decomposition of the Leinster-Cobbold Diversity Index

The Leinster and Cobbold diversity index possesses a number of merits; in particular, it generalises many existing indices and defines an effective number. We present a scheme to quantify the contribution of richness, evenness, and taxonomic similarity to this index. Compared to the work of van Dam (2019), our approach gives unbiased estimates of both evenness and similarity in a non-homogeneous community. We also introduce a notion of taxonomic tree equilibration which should be of use in the description of community structure.