Biodiversity

Choose one of the indices that measure the biodiversity in an ecosystem. You can than observe its computation as it is applied to the data set at the bottom of the screen. You can even edit the values in the table to provide your own data set.

Edward Hugh Simpson (1949) gave the probability of any two individuals drawn at random from an infinitely large community belonging to the same species, D. Simpson's diversity index is heavily weighted towards the most abundant species in the sample, while being less sensitive to species richness.

Shannon's diversity index (usually symbolized by H or H'), introduced by Claude Shannon, is one of the most well-known and widely-used diversity indices. It comes out of work on information theory by Wiener, applied to species abundances by Shannon, hence sometimes referred to as the Shannon-Wiener index.

Berger-Parker diversity index is the inverse of Berger-Parker dominance index, which is the proportion of the most common species in the community or sample. This is an example of an index which uses only partial information about the relative abundances of the various species in its definition.

Simpson's Index

Shannon's Index

Berger-Parker Index

Table View

Chart View

Little Grebe

Crested Grebe

Mute Swan

Greylag Goose

Total

Year