Why is species evenness important?

1 Answer
Apr 10, 2017

Species evenness is a measure of the relative abundance of the different species making up the richness of an area.

Explanation:

Evenness is the proportion of species or functional groups present on a site. The more equal species are in proportion to each other, the greater the evenness of the site. A site with low evenness indicates that a few species dominate the site.

If a community has a large disparity between the number of individuals within each species, it has low evenness. If the number of individuals within a species is fairly constant through out the community it has high evenness.

Evenness compares the similarity of the population size of each of species present.