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1. Measuring biodiversity quantitatively is a key component to its investigation, but many methods are known to be biased by undersampling (i.e. incomplete inventories), a common situation in ecological field studies.

2. Following a long tradition of comparing measures of alpha diversity to judge their usefulness, we used simulated data to assess bias of nine diversity measures – some of them proposed fairly recently, such as estimating true species richness depending on the completeness of inventories (Brose, U. & Martinez, N.D. Oikos (2004) 105, 292), bias‐corrected Shannon diversity (Chao, A. & Shen, T.‐J. Environmental and Ecological Statistics (2003) 10, 429), while others are commonly applied (e.g. Shannon’s entropy, Fisher’s α) or long known but rarely used (estimating Shannon’s entropy from Fisher’s α).

3. We conclude that the ‘effective number of species’ based on bias‐corrected Shannon’s …