On some properties of the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity and their ecological meaning
In this paper, we examine some basic properties of the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity as compared with other
distance and dissimilarity functions applied to ecological abundance data. We argue that the ability of
every coefficient to measure species-level contributions is a fundamental requirement. By suggesting an
additive decomposition formula for the Bray-Curtis coefficient we derive a general formula of
dissimilarity, which includes the Canberra distance and the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity as special cases. A