The researchers studied plant communities in Dinghushan Nature Reserve to see how diverse they were. They looked at different types of vegetation and found that as plant communities grew, the diversity increased. Surprisingly, the most mature forests didn't have the highest diversity. They also found that the order of species richness was shrub layer, herb layer, tree layer. The diversity index order was shrub layer, tree layer, herb layer. And the evenness order was tree layer, shrub layer, herb layer. The results were consistent whether they used important value index or number of individuals to measure diversity, but different when they used species coverage. The size of the area didn't have a big impact on diversity, especially the Shannon Winner index, which stayed stable once the area reached a certain size.