Note on LMC complexity measure

The measure presented by López-Ruiz, Mancini and Calbert (LMC) (López-Ruiz et al., 1995) has been used in several contexts to express system complexity. The main advantage of this approach is the ability to change the weights attributed to the order and disorder measures when composing the whole complexity factor for different applications. Here, several behaviors of the LMC measure are presented regarding system disorder, expressed by using the Boltzmann–Gibbs–Shannon (BGS) entropy. It is shown that the Γ1k function is adequate to measure ecological complexity and, varying k, it can be concluded that Γ11 simplifies the calculations, capturing the complex aspects of the ecological phenomena.