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	On-Farm Agrobiodiversity Index	Rural Livelihood Diversification Index
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	2000
Originator	Devra Jarvis & colleagues (on-farm crop-variety diversity framework); diversity indices after Magurran	Frank Ellis (rural livelihoods framework)
Type	Descriptive diversity-index pipeline for cultivated and reared diversity on farms	Descriptive concentration/diversity index pipeline for income sources
Seminal source	Jarvis, D. I., Brown, A. H. D., Cuong, P. H., Collado-Panduro, L., Latournerie-Moreno, L., Gyawali, S., et al. (2008). A global perspective of the richness and evenness of traditional crop-variety diversity maintained by farming communities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(14), 5326-5331.	Ellis, F. (2000). Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780198296966
Aliases	On-Farm Crop Diversity Index, Agrobiodiversity Index, Farm Varietal Diversity Index, Cultivated Diversity Index	Livelihood Diversification Index, Income Diversification Index, Simpson Index of Income Diversification, Herfindahl Diversification Measure
Related	4	3
Summary	The on-farm agrobiodiversity index applies the mathematics of biological diversity — richness, evenness, and combined indices such as Shannon, Simpson and Margalef — to the crops, landraces, varieties and livestock breeds that farmers actually maintain in their fields and herds. Rather than counting wild species in an ecosystem, it quantifies cultivated and reared diversity: how many distinct crop species and varieties a farm grows, how evenly the area or production is spread across them, and how this compares between farms, communities and regions. Devra Jarvis and a large international team showed in 2008 that these measures of richness, evenness and divergence reveal substantial crop-variety diversity still maintained on farms worldwide and provide a sound basis for indicators of on-farm conservation. Built on Magurran's standard diversity formulas, the index turns agrobiodiversity into measurable, comparable numbers for research and policy.	A rural livelihood diversification index summarises, in a single number, how spread out a household's income is across different sources and activities — farming, off-farm wage labour, self-employment, remittances, transfers — rather than concentrated in one. Grounded in Frank Ellis's rural livelihoods framework, which defines diversification as the process by which rural households construct an increasingly diverse portfolio of activities to survive and improve their living standards, the index borrows concentration measures such as the Herfindahl and its Simpson complement from ecology and industrial economics. A household relying wholly on one crop scores as undiversified and exposed; one drawing evenly on many sources scores as highly diversified and, often, more resilient.