Just try it and you will see. You may get a lot of criticism from people who either never used or would never use these indices, but I am sure that it will help you to analyze your data. You don't have to publish it, but you will get a better insight into your data.
The size is another hot potato in your project. You touched the question of minimal area that is another sensitive problem in vegetation sampling. Are your patches large enough to get the majority of species in them? You will get some random noise, if your areas are too large, but skewed results, if they are too small. It depends on the vegetation types you are working with. Adolf Ceska P.S. I prefer Sorensen's similarity index. -----Original Message----- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Rajasri Ray Sent: June-13-11 10:23 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Similarity index Hello, I am trying to compare species composition among different patches which vary in their sizes to a great extent.I am planning to compute Jaccard's similarity index for this. For species enumeration, in some patches I have documented presence of all members (due to very small size of the patch ~ 80 - 500 sq. m).There is problem to apply uniform area concept for species composition. I would like to know whether Jaccard's is suitable for that kind of comparison. Thanks Rajasri
