What is the Shannon equitability index?

What is the Shannon equitability index?

The Shannon Equitability Index is a way to measure the evenness of species in a community. The term “evenness” simply refers to how similar the abundances of different species are in the community.

What is the Shannon diversity index?

The Shannon diversity index (a.k.a. the Shannon–Wiener diversity index) is a popular metric used in ecology. It’s based on Claude Shannon’s formula for entropy and estimates species diversity. The index takes into account the number of species living in a habitat (richness) and their relative abundance (evenness).

How do you interpret Shannon evenness index?

For a given number of classes (Richness), an Evenness = 1 is reached when all classes have the same area. Thus, higher values indicate that the number of pixels (area) is more evenly distributed between the land cover classes.

How do you use the Shannon-Wiener index?

The Shannon-Weiner Species Diversity Index is calculated by taking the number of each species, the proportion each species is of the total number of individuals, and sums the proportion times the natural log of the proportion for each species.

How is Shannon-Wiener index calculated?

The Shannon-Wiener Diversity Index, H, is calculated using the following equation: H = -å Pi(lnPi) where Pi is the proportion of each species in the sample. Given a very large sample size, with more than 5 species, the S-W index values (H) can range of 0 to ~4.6 using the natural log (ln).

Which is a better index of diversity low or high?

The higher the value, the greater the diversity. The maximum value is the number of species (or other category being used) in the sample. For example if there are five species in the sample, then the maximum value is 5.

How do you use Shannon Index?

Take the natural logarithm of each proportion (lnp) and then multiply the proportion and the ln of the proportion (p*lnp). Add these values together, take the negative value of it (to make it positive) and you will have your Shannon Weiner index score (H’).

What does the evenness value mean?

In diversity studies, evenness refers to the similarity of frequencies of the different units making up a population (or sample). It is complementary to richness, which is the number of different units relative to population (or sample) size.

What do you mean by richness and evenness of biodiversity?

Abstract. Evidence about the health of ecosystems is often thought to be related to biodiversity. Traditional attempts to define biodiversity consider two components: richness—the number of species in the ecosystem—and evenness—the extent to which species are evenly distributed.

What does it mean if the Shannon equitability index is 0?

The lower the value of H, the lower the diversity. A value of H = 0 indicates a community that only has one species. The Shannon Equitability Index is a way to measure the evenness of species in a community.

How do you calculate Shannon Diversity and equitability?

The Shannon Diversity Index for this community is 1.49. She can also use the following formula to calculate the Shannon Equitability Index: EH = H / ln(S) For this example, there are S = 5 total species, so see can calculate this index to be: EH = 1.49 / ln(5) = 0.92.

What is the Shannon Diversity Index?

The Shannon Diversity Index (sometimes called the Shannon-Wiener Index) is a way to measure the diversity of species in a community. Denoted as H, this index is calculated as: H = -Σpi * ln (pi)

What is the Shannon-Wiener index?

The Shannon Diversity Index (sometimes called the Shannon-Wiener Index) is a way to measure the diversity of species in a community. The higher the value of H, the higher the diversity of species in a particular community.