Ecologists have been interested in assessing patterns of species co-occurrence in nature, with the hope of understanding underlying processes that determine why some species tend to occur together in the same location, whereas others don't tend to be found together. PhD student, Mike Lavender has been working in collaboration with Drs. Brandon Schamp and Jim Rusak to investigate the utility of the many metrics that have been designed to investigate patterns of species co-occurrence, including SCoE, an evenness-based metric that he developed. Using simulation modelling he has compared the performance of pair-wise metrics (Lavender et al. 2018) and community-wide metrics (Lavender et al. submitted).