Relative species abundance is a component of biodiversity and is a measure of how common or rare a species is relative to other species in a defined location or community. Relative abundance is the percent composition of an organism of a particular kind relative to the total number of organisms in the area. Relative species abundances tend to conform to specific patterns that are among the best-known and most-studied patterns in macroecology. Different populations in a community exist in relative proportions; this idea is known as relative abundance.
>>>PUT SHARE BUTTONS HERE<<<
In this Dossier
Relative species abundance in the context of Abundance (ecology)
In ecology, local abundance is the relative representation of a species in a particular ecosystem. It is usually measured as the number of individuals found per sample. The ratio of abundance of one species to one or multiple other species living in an ecosystem is referred to as relative species abundances. Both indicators are relevant for computing biodiversity.
A variety of sampling methods are used to measure abundance. For larger animals, these may include spotlight counts, track counts and roadkill counts, as well as presence at monitoring stations. In many plant communities the abundances of plant species are measured by plant cover, i.e. the relative areacovered by different plant species in a small plot. Abundance is in simplest terms usually measured by identifying and counting every individual of every species in a given sector. It is common for the distribution of species to be skewed so that a few species take up the bulk of individuals collected.
Relative species abundance in the context of Species richness
Species richness is the number of different species represented in an ecological community, landscape or region. Species richness is simply a count of species, and it does not take into account the abundances of the species or their relative abundance distributions. Species richness is sometimes considered synonymous with species diversity, but the formal metric species diversity takes into account both species richness and species evenness.
Relative species abundance in the context of Rank abundance curve
A rank abundance curve or Whittaker plot is a chart used by ecologists to display relative species abundance, a component of biodiversity. It can also be used to visualize species richness and species evenness. It overcomes the shortcomings of biodiversity indices that cannot display the relative role different variables played in their calculation.
The curve is a 2D chart with relative abundance on the Y-axis and the abundance rank on the X-axis.