Biodiversity, according to the Convention of Biological Diversity, is: "the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are a part; this includes diversity within species, between species, and of ecosystems." Biodiversity is very important part of the environment since it helps it regulates the balance and the reusing and recycling of energy and materials within the ecosystem.
To study a certain area biodiversity needs to be measured. To measure biodiversity, we usually focus on 5 ways: Species richness, species evenness, disparity, species rarity, and genetic variability.
- Species richness: refers to the total number of members of a given species in a quantified area.
- Species Evenness: he degree to which the number of individual organisms are evenly divided between different species of the community.
- Disparity: measures the phenotypic differences among species resulting from the differences genes within a population.
- Species Rarity: the rarity of individual organisms within a quantified are.
- Genetic Variability: each population of species contributes to additional biodiversity due to variations between genes
There are other ways to measure biodiversity that combine richness and equitability. Most ecologist use the Shannon-Weiner or Information index:
that only means that you need to get the proportion of the specie to the whole and then multiply that number by its natural logarithm.
For additional information go to:
The encyclopedia of earth: http://www.eoearth.org/article/biodiversity
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