Even evenness is important: the direct and mediating effects of species abundances for ecosystem services

This consistency across multiple indices demonstrates that evenness captures a meaningful and reliable aspect of community structure, supporting its usefulness as an ecological concept. Recently, there has been a debate on the usefulness of evenness as a concept in ecology, and it has been argued by Alroy (2025) that evenness is only an abstract concept, which is not reflecting a useful community property. The results of the study by Zhou et al. contribute to resolving this debate by showing tha