Home – Home – Jornals – Contemporary Problems of Ecology 2009 number 4

The notion of species diversity includes two components: species richness and uniformity. Species diversity is the number of species per unit area (geobotanical description). Uniformity is the distribution of species over their abundance in a community. There is a positive correlation between these indices; however, high species richness is not necessarily accompanied by high uniformity. It is impossible to compare the species richness of the communities formed by the plants of different size (rain tropical forest and meadow steppe). High species diversity is peculiar to the plant communities with a medium level of productivity, medium degree of disturbance and is not connected with their stability.