Rarefaction and extrapolation with Hill numbers: a study of diversity in the Ross Sea

Abstract. The Ross Sea can be considered, in a biological sense, one of the better-known areas in Antarctica due to the high number of expeditions engaged since 1899. Hundreds of mollusc species have been collected and classified along years in a unique database which is now available for study. The possibility to access such impressive information offers the opportunity to apply important results in the study of biodiversity for that area. Recent influential scientific contributions induce us to study species diversity by means of accumulation curves based on Hill numbers, i.e. the effective number of equally frequent species