Regional consistency of intertidal elevation as a mediator of seaweed canopy effects on benthic species richness, diversity, and composition

Abstract

Rocky intertidal ecology has traditionally been important to develop ecological theory (Paine 1966, Underwood 1980, Menge & Sutherland 1987). This paper focuses on the richness, diversity, and composition of rocky intertidal communities. Richness is the number of species in a community, while diversity refers to how likely 2 randomly selected individuals belong to different species and is based on richness and the relative abundance of species (Krebs 1999). Composition is a multivariate measure that considers the identity of species in addition to their relative abundance. These traits may exhibit different spatial patterns in nature, so they provide complementary information on community structure and functioning (