How is biodiversity measured?
Biodiversity is a broad concept, so a variety of objective measures have been created in order to empirically measure biodiversity. For practical conservationists, this measure should quantify a value that is broadly shared among locally affected people. For others, a more economically defensible definition should allow the ensuring of continued possibilities for both adaptation and future use by people, assuring environmental sustainability. Biodiversity is not distributed evenly on Earth. Flora and fauna vary depending on climate, altitude, soils and the presence of other species. Earth’s species are formally classified as rare, endangered, threatened or extinct species. Biodiversity is usually plotted as taxonomic richness of a geographic area, with some reference to a temporal scale. Alpha diversity refers to diversity within a particular area. Community or ecosystem, and is measured by counting the number of species within the ecosystem. Beta diversity is species diversity between
