Comparing Communities: Using β-diversity and similarity/dissimilarity indices to measure diversity across sites, communities, and landscapes

This webpage is about how to compare species diversity (using only species richness or species richness and abundance) among sites/habitats/communities. Some people call this beta diversity and others call it complementarity, turnover, similarity, dissimilarity, etc. Often, these terms are used interchangeably and at a variety of spatial scales. Methods for making these comparisons are used in other fields of science but we will only address ecology-based methods here.