PEDODIVERSITY - CONCEPTS AND MEASURES

Indices and models of diversity have proved to be valuable in ecology. They may be used to explore, quantify and compare the complexity of s oil patterns in different areas and environments. The different ways o f measuring diversity may be grouped into three classes: indices of ri chness, abundance distribution models, and indices based on proportion al abundance of objects. Four scales of diversity can be distinguished : point scaling diversity (polypedon), alpha scaling diversity (soil a ssociation), gamma scaling diversity (landscape or drainage basin) and epsilon scaling diversity (geographical soil region). Differentiation diversity is a measure of how different a range of soilscapes are in terms of the variety. Diversity-area relationships are then analyzed. Examples of how to apply these indices for analysing soil patterns and their results are shown. From these results it is inferred that diver sity indices in the analysis of soil patterns would be similar to thos e for biodiversity in ecology. This suggests that there are common pro cesses of organization of biotic and abiotic ecological structures.