Table 2.

Summary of the classifications and features of commonly used alpha and beta diversity metrics¹

Metric	Alpha or Beta	Richness	Evenness	Phylogenetic
Observed features	Alpha	X
Pielou’s Evenness	Alpha		X
Shannon’s Index	Alpha	X	X
Faith’s Phylogenetic Diversity	Alpha	X		X
Jaccard’s Distance	Beta	X
Bray–Curtis Distance	Beta		X
Unweighted UniFrac	Beta	X		X
Weighted Unifrac	Beta	X	X	X

1X indicates the metric includes this feature.