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A variety of objective means exist to empirically measure biodiversity. Each measure relates to a particular use of the data, and is likely to be associated with the variety of genes. Biodiversity is commonly measured in terms of taxonomic richness of a geographic area over a time interval. In order to calculate biodiversity, species evenness ...
Relative species abundance is a component of biodiversity and is a measure of how common or rare a species is relative to other species in a defined location or community. [1] Relative abundance is the percent composition of an organism of a particular kind relative to the total number of organisms in the area.
Species richness, or biodiversity, increases from the poles to the tropics for a wide variety of terrestrial and marine organisms, often referred to as the latitudinal diversity gradient. [1] The latitudinal diversity gradient is one of the most widely recognized patterns in ecology. [1] It has been observed to varying degrees in Earth's past. [2]
SAD is a measurement of how common, or rare species are within an ecosystem. [5] This allows researchers to assess how different species are distributed throughout an ecosystem. SAD is one of the most basic measurements in ecology and is used very often, therefore many different methods of measurement and analysis have developed.
The observed species richness is affected not only by the number of individuals but also by the heterogeneity of the sample. If individuals are drawn from different environmental conditions (or different habitats), the species richness of the resulting set can be expected to be higher than if all individuals are drawn from similar environments.
Species evenness is combined with species richness, (the number of species in the community), in order to determine species diversity, which is an important measure of community structure. Community structure in turn provides the quantitative basis needed to create hypotheses and experiments that help to increase understanding of how ...
This measure allows weighting rare and abundant species in different ways, just as the diversity indices collectively do, but its meaning is intuitively easier to understand. The effective number of species is the number of equally-abundant species needed to obtain the same mean proportional species abundance as that observed in the dataset of ...
functional diversity (which is a measure of the number of functionally disparate species within a population (e.g. different feeding mechanism, different motility, predator vs prey, etc.) [12]) Biodiversity is most commonly used to replace the more clearly-defined and long-established terms, species diversity and species richness. [13]