Taxonomic diversity metrics
Species richness and cover were averaged across the 6 seasonal subplots in each site. Species evenness was obtained by using the Inverse Simpson index (considered as “simpson”) in the adiv package (Pavoine, 2020). The index is as follows: \((1/\sum jp2ij)/Si\), where Si is the number of species in a community, \(p\text{ij}\)is the relative abundance of species \(j\) in community \(i\). This index was selected due to its high sensitivity to both dominant and rare species with symmetry between them (Smith & Wilson, 1996; Beisel et al. 2003).