Figure 2.
Species richness as a function of the number of individuals (rarefaction curves). (a) Species in communities A and B have similar relative abundances (quantified in our analyses using the effective number of species conversion of the probability of interspecific encounter, ENSPIE), but different total numbers of species (black dots) due to more individuals in community A. (b) Communities A and C have similar total and relative abundances, but different species richness due to more rare species in community A. (c) Species in communities A and D have different relative abundances, leading to scale-dependent differences in species richness. (d) Individual-based rarefaction can also be used to infer within-species aggregation when relative abundances become more even with increasing scale [7,15].