Question

You are a researcher using jaccard's index to examine the similarity of two climax communities in alaska. what would an index score of 0.8 tell you about the two communities?

a. their plant communities are mostly similar in composition.
b. their plant communities are mostly different in composition.
c. they have no plant species in common.
d. they have nearly identical plant communities.
e. they have the same number of shared and unique plant species.

Answer 1

A Jaccard's index score of 0.8 indicates that the two climax communities in Alaska have plant communities that are mostly similar in composition, with a high level of overlap in species.

Step-by-step explanation:

When a researcher is using Jaccard's index to examine the similarity of two climax communities and finds a score of 0.8, it indicates that the plant communities are mostly similar in composition. Jaccard's index is a measure used in ecology to compare the similarity between two sets of data. If two communities have a Jaccard's index score of 0.8, this suggests that 80% of the plant species found in one community can also be found in the second community, which represents a high level of similarity. It does not imply that communities are nearly identical (which would be closer to 1.0), nor does it mean they share exactly the same number of unique and shared plant species. Instead, it indicates substantial overlap in species composition.