Among those are spiritual, aesthetic, economic, environmental and ethical reasons on which a multitude ob books and scientific articles are published every year. Conserving biodiversity is the still driving bandwaggon that environmentalists and conservationists jumped on quite some time ago. It is taught in every evolutionary biology, ecology, conservation and even economics class (to name only a few). The conceptual, quantitative and qualitative importance of the diversity of life (biodiversity, roughly saying) can hardly be overstated. This post gives an overview of the most commonly used biodiversity indices, how to choose which index to use and how to calculate them in the R programming environment using the package vegan. Neither of these measures of diversity is „wrong“ – species richness and evenness are two (among many) of biodiversity’s facets, and no single number can incorporate them both without loss of information. two species) but sample B is more diversie in that there is less chance in sample B that two randomly chosen individuals will be of the same species. Which samples is more diverse? At first sight it must be samlple A (three vs. Zalta (ed.)Īny attempt to measure biodiversity quickly runs into the problem that it is a fundamentally multidimensional concept: it cannot be reduced sensibly to a single number:įrom: Andy Purvis and Andy Hector (2000): Getting the measure of biodiversity. This biodiversity pluralism is based on an argument that inevitably there are many different “theory bound” versions of biodiversity and many different ways to value it.ĭespite a wide range of usage, biodiversity (species diveristy, genetic diversity, ecological diversiy, functional diversity) remains a concept strongly linked to the idea of biological variation that is largely unknown in its extent, and its future values.įaith, Daniel P., „Biodiversity“, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 Edition), Edward N. In fact, Norton claims that any increase in our understanding of biodiversity will make it less likely that there will be a single objective measure. ![]() Norton (1994) has argued that there will never be a single “objective scientific definition” of biodiversity, in the sense of a prescription for how to measure it. They concluded that it remains ill-defined, and that distinctions can be made between „functional“ and „compositional“ perspectives in approaching biodiversity. “Functional” refers to a primarily concern with ecosystem and evolutionary processes, while “compositional” sees organisms as aggregated into populations, species, higher taxa, communities, and other categories. (1999) examined „biodiversity“ as one of the current normative concepts in conservation.
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