Biodiversity partitioning for transitional water ecosystems

Biodiversity partitioning means that the biodiversity of all individuals in a given meta- community may be split into the diversity within and between local communities. In this work we adopt diversity measures based on the deformed exponential transformation of the Tsallis entropy to analyze biodiversity partitioning in the Po River Delta. Several measures are investigated with varying importance given to rare species. Mixed effects models are then used to investigate the variation of diversity measures with fixed effects such as vegetation cover and sediment type and random effects ruled by nested sources of variability.