Alpha diversity refers to the diversity of organisms within a single individual's gut, considering both the number of unique species and their evenness of distribution.

“so alpha diversity is really looking at the diversity within a sample versus beta diversity is usually looking between samples so that's usually in a study that you'd be looking at beta diversity versus alpha diversity versus alpha diversity we're looking in a single individual what's the diversity of organisms in their gut so that's looking at both the number of unique organisms in their gut and also kind of the spread across um in terms of you know if if you had a num a lot of unique organisms but 90 of them were one microbe that wouldn't be a very diverse gut so it's also looking at the evenness across um species as well distribution the distribution okay”