Abstract:The patterns of dominant species in Elaeagnus mollis communities in Shanxi were studied using the following measures: dispersal index, clump intensity, mean crowding, patchiness index, Green’s index, intensity index, the test for fit to the Poisson and negative binomial distribution. The relationships among the first six methods were analyzed by correlation coefficient. The results indicated that E. mollis showed random distribution while the other species in the community were all clumped. Moreover, the patterns not only were closely related to the ecological and biological characteristics of each species, but also relationships of competitive exclusion among them. Among 8 methods used to measure pattern, the application of variance/mean ratio together with the X2 test for fit to the Poisson and negative binomial distributions were deemed the best as their ecological meaning is explicit. Furthermore, their results have more obvious statistical significance.