A New Measure of Functional Evenness and Some of Its Properties

Functional evenness is increasingly considered an important facet of functional diversity that sheds light on the complex relationships between community assembly and ecosystem functioning. Nonetheless, in spite of its relevant role for ecosystem functioning, only a few measures of functional evenness have been proposed. In this paper we introduce a new measure of functional evenness that reflects the regularity in the distribution of species abundances, together with the evenness in their pairwise functional dissimilarities. To show how the proposed measure works, we focus on changes in functional evenness calculated from Grime’s classification of plant strategies as competitors (C), stress-tolerators (S) and ruderals (R) along a post-fire successional gradient in temperate chestnut forests of southern Switzerland.