VIRTUE: Biodiversity indices

Biodiversity can be expressed in numbers:

VIRTUE: Biodiversity indices View data   Register data

Species richness (S) is the total number of species found in an environment/sample. Simpson's index (D) is the probability that two randomly selected individuals belong to two different species/categories Shannon-Wiener index (H) is measuring the order/disorder in a particular system. This order is characterized by the number of individuals found for each species/category in the sample.A high species diversity may indicate a healthy environment. Evenness (E) is a measure of how similar the abundances of different species/categories are in a community. Evenness is ranged from zero to one. When evenness is close to zero, it indicates that most of the individuals belongs to one or a few species/categories. When the evenness is close to one, it indicates that each species/categories consists of the same number of individuals.