Note on LMC complexity measure

► LMC measure has been used in several complexity contexts. ► LMC measure expresses each context by changing the weights of order and disorder. ► An important question remains: how the weights affect the results. ► An analytical result is proposed and some numerical examples clarify the question. 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 Γ 1 k function is adequate to measure ecological complexity and, varying k, it can be concluded that Γ 11 simplifies the calculations, capturing the complex aspects of the ecological phenomena.