How to measure biodiversity?
A simple measure of biodiversity would be the number of species in that area. Of course, if you are including microbes, this could be very difficult to ascertain. So you can restrict your measure of biodiversity to larger organisms. Yet, a simple number count of species doesn’t take into account other factors. Consider the case where you have a forest composed of pine trees with one lone oak versus another forest that was 50% pine trees and 50% oaks. Is their biodiversity the same? In addition, an area could be dominated by many types of beetles and little else. Therefore some would include a component of genetic diversity of the organisms in the ecosystem population of species. Finally, there is an area effect – the larger the area, the more species you are likely to include. The result is that there are multiple measures of biodiversity. Why is biodiversity important to humans?
