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#species abundance

2 public questions tagged with this topic.

Diversity due to differences in abundance of species is called:

Evenness measures how uniformly individuals are distributed among the species present. Two communities may contain the same number of species yet differ greatly in diversity if one is dominated by a single species while the other has comparable abundances throughout. Richness counts species without considering their relative numbers, whereas dominance emphasizes concentration in one or a few taxa. Turnover instead describes compositional change across places or times. Thus abundance differences are captured specifically by evenness, an essential component of indices such as Shannon diversity.

Ref: NCERT Biology Class 12, Ch. 15 Biodiversity and Conservation

A community with 10 species, each with 10 individuals has:

Ten species represented by ten individuals each have identical relative abundance, pᵢ = 10/100 = 0.1. This is perfect evenness because no species is numerically dominant. For a fixed richness, equal abundance maximizes both Shannon diversity and the Gini–Simpson index. Shannon diversity would be H′ = −10(0.1 ln 0.1) = ln 10, and Pielou’s evenness H′/ln S would equal 1. Simpson dominance would be 10(0.1²) = 0.1, relatively low, while 1 − D would be 0.9. The community also has a richness of ten species; whether that richness is “high” depends on the taxon, area, and comparison community, but it

Ref: NCERT Biology Class 12, Ch. 15 Biodiversity and Conservation