The Relation between Evenness and Diversity

By L. Jost. 2010

537 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Contrary to common belief, decomposition of diversity into independent richness and evenness components is mathematically impossible. However, richness can be decomposed into independent diversity and evenness or inequality components. The evenness or inequality component derived in this way is connected to most of the common measures of evenness and inequality in ecology and economics. This perspective justifies the derivation of measures of relative evenness, which give the amount of evenness relative to the maximum and minimum possible for a given richness. Pielou’s [1] evenness measure J is shown to be such a measure.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8540ace0bdf4d5c3cc43815be2c9b7dd45b37e41

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Citations in the corpus

Rarefaction and extrapolation with Hill numbers: a framework for sampling and estimation in species diversity studies (2014, unknown): “Jost (2010) suggested estimating both S and Hill numbers at ﬁxed coverage to obtain meaningful estimates of evenness and inequality indices.”
Entropy and the species accumulation curve: a novel entropy estimator via discovery rates of new species (2013, methodology): “Shannon entropy and its exponential have been used to characterize class uncertainty and diversity in ecology, genetics, information theory, computer science, cryptography, physics, neuroscience, linguistics, bioinformatics and other fields (Shannon 1948; Lewontin 1972; Pielou 1977; Paninski 2003; M”
Does pollen-assemblage richness reflect floristic richness? A review of recent developments and future challenges (2016, unknown): “They used Shannon’s entropies and following Jost (2007, 2010) they partitioned 1042 diversity into independent alpha, beta, and gamma components.”
Coverage-based rarefaction and extrapolation: standardizing samples by completeness rather than size. (2012, methodology): “Replication principle for samples standardized by coverage Estimates of species richness standardized by coverage preserve an important property of species richness, a kind of replication principle, as first noted by Alroy (2010¿0 and Jost (2010).”
Chronic anthropogenic disturbance drives the biological impoverishment of the Brazilian Caatinga vegetation (2015, methodology): “Journal of Applied Ecology © 2015 British Ecological Society, Journal of Applied Ecology 1/0D (when the community is dominated by one species; Jost 2010).”
Precipitation mediates the effect of human disturbance on the Brazilian Caatinga vegetation (2017, methodology): “It ranges between 1 (when the community is perfectly even) and nearly 1/0D (when the community is dominated by one species; Jost 2010).”
Estimating diversity and entropy profiles via discovery rates of new species (2015, background): “Hill numbers were recently extended to incorporate species phylogeny and/or function (Leinster & Cobbold 2012; Scheiner 2012; Chao, Chiu & Jost 2010, 2014).”
Quantifying sample completeness and comparing diversities among assemblages (2020, methodology): “Although this ratio is only slightly different from the measure qE given above, Jost (2010) pointed out that this ratio ranges from 1/S to 1 because diversity takes values between 1 and S.”
An attribute‐diversity approach to functional diversity, functional beta diversity, and related (dis)similarity measures (2019, background): “For any q > 0, the normalized slope of the diversity profile in the range [0, 1] is expressed as (qD 1)/(0D 1), which quantifies the evenness among species relative abundances (Jost 2010).”
Regional and global elevational patterns of microbial species richness and evenness (2017, background): “Although decomposition of diversity into truly independent richness and evenness components is mathematically impossible, Pielou’s evenness [J  H/log (S), where H is the Shannon–Weaver diversity index and S is the number of species] (Pielou 1966) is a good measure of distribution of relative abunda”
An updated consumer’s guide to evenness and related indices (2012, methodology): “Jost (2010) equated richness R with diversity of order zero 0D, and hence treated evenness qE and the diversity ratio Dq/0 as synonyms.”