Abstract
A popular measure of differentiation in biodiversity is the Bray Curtis
index of dissimilarity. It has recently also been proposed for use in
molecular ecology. However, this measure currently cannot be predicted
under specified conditions of population size, dispersal and speciation
or mutation. Here I show forecasts for Bray-Curtis for two-variant
systems such as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) (or two species
ecosystems). These are derived from well-known equations in population
genetics, for forecasting measures such as G_ST, and shown to be
appropriate by simulation. Thus, Bray-Curtis can now be used for
assessment of differentiation, in order to understand natural or
artificial processes, thus complementing other measures with different
sensitivities, such as Morisita-Horn/D_EST, G_ST and Shannon Mutual
Information/Shannon Differentiation.