The number of natural descents of a standard Young tableau. A natural descent of a standard tableau $T$ is an entry $i$ such that $i+1$ appears in a higher row than $i$ in English notation.

The number of descents of a set partition. The Mahonian representation of a set partition $\{B_1,\dots,B_k\}$ of $\{1,\dots,n\}$ is the restricted growth word $w_1\dots w_n\}$ obtained by sorting the blocks of the set partition according to their maximal element, and setting $w_i$ to the index of the block containing $i$. The word $w$ has a descent at position $i$ if $w_i > w_{i+1}$.

The width of the tree associated to a permutation. A permutation can be mapped to a rooted tree with vertices $\{0,1,2,\ldots,n\}$ and root $0$ in the following way. Entries of the permutations are inserted one after the other, each child is larger than its parent and the children are in strict order from left to right. Details of the construction are found in [1]. The width of the tree is given by the number of leaves of this tree. Note that, due to the construction of this tree, the width of the tree is always one more than the number of descents [[St000021]]. This also matches the number of runs in a permutation [[St000470]]. See also [[St000308]] for the height of this tree.

The number of runs in a permutation. A run in a permutation is an inclusion-wise maximal increasing substring, i.e., a contiguous subsequence. This is the same as the number of descents plus 1.

The number of descents of a permutation. This can be described as an occurrence of the vincular mesh pattern ([2,1], {(1,0),(1,1),(1,2)}), i.e., the middle column is shaded, see [3].

The number of descents of a standard tableau. Entry $i$ of a standard Young tableau is a descent if $i+1$ appears in a row below the row of $i$.

The number of big descents of a permutation. For a permutation $\pi$, this is the number of indices $i$ such that $\pi(i)-\pi(i+1) > 1$. The generating functions of big descents is equal to the generating function of (normal) descents after sending a permutation from cycle to one-line notation [[Mp00090]], see [Theorem 2.5, 1]. For the number of small descents, see [[St000214]].

The staircase size of the code of a permutation. The code $c(\pi)$ of a permutation $\pi$ of length $n$ is given by the sequence $(c_1,\ldots,c_{n})$ with $c_i = |\{j > i : \pi(j) < \pi(i)\}|$. This is a bijection between permutations and all sequences $(c_1,\ldots,c_n)$ with $0 \leq c_i \leq n-i$. The staircase size of the code is the maximal $k$ such that there exists a subsequence $(c_{i_k},\ldots,c_{i_1})$ of $c(\pi)$ with $c_{i_j} \geq j$. This statistic is mapped through [[Mp00062]] to the number of descents, showing that together with the number of inversions [[St000018]] it is Euler-Mahonian.

The maximum of the number of descents and the number of inverse descents. This is, the maximum of [[St000021]] and [[St000354]].

The number of recoils of a permutation. A '''recoil''', or '''inverse descent''' of a permutation $\pi$ is a value $i$ such that $i+1$ appears to the left of $i$ in $\pi_1,\pi_2,\dots,\pi_n$. In other words, this is the number of descents of the inverse permutation. It can be also be described as the number of occurrences of the mesh pattern $([2,1], {(0,1),(1,1),(2,1)})$, i.e., the middle row is shaded.