Heip

The Heip evenness measure (Heip,1974) is defined as:

where

H is the Shannon diversity index and

S is species number.

Heip (1974) developed this index to remove the dependence on S that earlier indices possessed. Further, he felt that previous indices did not always give a low value when an ecologist would have thought evenness to be low. A property which Heip considered important was that this index remains constant when the numbers of all species is multiplied by a constant.