Dominant species in plant communities have received ample attention and characterization, but species codominance, while often alleged, is seldom defined or quantified. A wide range of relative abundances have been associated with codominance, and species classified as codominant have had both highly similar and disparate relative abundances reported. The ambiguous use of the term codominance can be both misleading and an unfortunate obstacle for biodiversity-ecosystem function research. We present a novel metric for quantifying the degree to which relative abundance is shared among species within a codominant subset and excluded from the remaining species within a community.
Results/Conclusions
We demonstrate how information can be gained from using this metric to compare communities from different ecosystems, communities within the same system receiving different experimental treatments, or a single community at different time points. We believe that this metric can serve as a valuable complement to other biodiversity metrics such as Simpson’s dominance and Pielou’s evenness indices.