The Structure of Diatom Communities in Similar Ecological Conditions

These experiments were designed to determine the degree and kind of variability in the structure of the community that one might expect under very similar ecological conditions. The results of these experiments show that 95.5% to 98.0% of the specimens composed the same species in the eight communities. About 5% of the specimens were in the remaining species in one series of experiments and 1% to 2% of the species in the second series. The Shannon-Weaver diversity indices and the structures of the truncated log-normal curves representing the communities in a given series were also very similar.