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 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 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 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 number of right descents of a signed permutations. An index is a right descent if it is a left descent of the inverse signed permutation.

The number of descents in a parking function. This is the number of indices $i$ such that $p_i > p_{i+1}$.