Steinhaus

There is some confusion in the literature as to the correct name for this distance measure. It is attributed to Steinhaus by Motyka (See Legendre & Legendre, 1983) and is also called the Mean Character Difference (the name used by CAP).

For two samples the distance is given by:

where w is the sum of the minimum abundances of the species in the two samples, A is the sum of species abundance in sample 1, and B is the sum of species abundance in sample 2.