Abstract
There is great concern about the ongoing decline of biodiversity. An important question is how this loss will affect ecosystem functioning. To approach this issue, we need to define biodiversity and choose appropriate methods to measure it. At its most basic level, diversity of a community may be expressed by the number of distinct species it contains (species richness). However, a community of a given richness where each species is equally represented is more diverse than a community of the same richness where a few species dominate. Both aspects (richness and evenness, i.e., the distribution of individuals among species) are essential when quantifying diversity. This chapter introduces important aspects to consider when estimating species richness. For meaningful comparisons of samples of different sizes, the diversity of communities may need to be adjusted by rarefaction. Or, we may estimate the expected diversity of a community by applying estimates based on species-area relationships. There are numerous indices of diversity, with the most popular measures based on information theory. The objective is to measure the degree of order (or disorder) in a system. The underlying question is: How difficult would it be to predict correctly the species of the next individual collected?
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Bärlocher, F. (2020). Biodiversity Analyses. In: Bärlocher, F., Gessner, M., Graça, M. (eds) Methods to Study Litter Decomposition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30515-4_61
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