Abstract
BIOLOGICAL communities usually contain few species with many individuals and many species with few individuals1. Diversity of higher organisms generally has been found to decrease with increasing population size1. Communities in physically stressed ecosystems, such as in polar regions, characteristically have low species diversity2. Diversity indices have been used to express species diversity in plant and animal communities, especially as a measure of stress on community structure2. Amongst microorganisms, diversity indices have been applied to microscopic phytoplankton populations3,4, but not to bacterial populations. Bacterial populations, however, show large variations in species diversity. For example, infections are dominated by one or a few species, whereas many bacterial species are found in an ecosystem such as soil5. We report here the application of taxonomic diversity indices to bacterial populations and a study of the relationship of the diversity indices of such populations to population size and to population-independent factors such as geographic location.
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KANEKO, T., ATLAS, R. & KRICHEVSKY, M. Diversity of bacterial populations in the Beaufort Sea. Nature 270, 596–599 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1038/270596a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/270596a0
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