McIntosh D

Proposed by McIntosh (1967) as:

where N is the total number of individuals in the sample

and U is given by the expression :

where n(i) is the number of individuals in the ith species and the summation is undertaken over all the species. U is the Euclidean distance of the community from the origin when plotted in an S-dimensional hypervolume (we are not joking!).

This index has been little used.

A simple plot of the way the index changes between samples is displayed by clicking on the graph tab on the output window.

To compare two indices see Testing for significant differences between indices.