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Understanding the causes of the generally positive relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) is a major research focus in ecology. Early analyses of BEF used a modification of the evolutionary Price equation to partition effects of biodiversity into components of complementarity (species richness) and dominance (species composition). However, early experiments and data on BEF did not use information on species traits or relative abundances. Here we extend the Price partition of the total expression of a single trait (such as leaf area) between two communities into five additive components: 1) species richness; 2) average species trait expression; 3) relative abundance; 4) the combined effects of relative abundance and trait expression; 5) absolute abundance. When applied to presence–absence data with no trait variation, the method yields a result that is identical to the original Price partition into two components of complementarity and dominance. When applied to an analysis of relative abundance itself as a trait, our method quantifies the strength of species co‐occurrences as a difference in Simpson diversity between the communities. We tested the new partition with artificial data sets and null model comparisons, and applied it to a long‐term data set on plant succession. A key finding is that the effects of total abundance might be very important when comparing two communities, and possibly could account for results from previous studies in which complementarity emerged as an important contributor to BEF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]