A parametric index of community evenness

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Abstract
Species relative abundance or community evenness is a basic component of any biodiversity measure. Several evenness indices have thus far been proposed in ecological literature. However, despite its vast potential applicability in ecological research, none seems to be generally preferred. Furthermore, only very few parametric evenness families have thus far been proposed. While traditional evenness indices supply point descriptions of community evenness, according to a parametric evenness family E(α), there is a continuum of possible evenness measures that differ in their sensitivity to the presence of dominant and rare species as a function of the parameter α. Therefore, changing α allows for vector descriptions of community structure represented by its diversity profile of E(α) versus α. In this paper, we propose that Hill’s parametric evenness family Eα,0 has a number of properties that may render it a desirable measure of evenness for ecological diversity studies. Two artificial communities are used to evaluate the performance of Eα,0 in quantifying community evenness.