Of beta diversity, variance, evenness, and dissimilarity
The amount of variation in species composition among sampling units or beta diversity has become a primary tool for connecting the spatial structure of species assemblages to ecological processes. Many different measures of beta diversity have been developed. Among them, the total variance in the community composition matrix has been proposed as a single-number estimate of beta diversity. In this study, I first show that this measure summarizes the compositional variation among sampling units after nonlinear transformation of species abundances.