Synonyms
Number of species per area/region/ecosystem
Definition
Species richness is the simplest way to describe biotic community and regional diversity (Maguran, 1988). It refers to the number of species in an area, biotic community, or ecosystem. Species richness does not take into account the abundances of the species or their relative abundance distribution, but rather the number of species in a particular area considering their phylogenetic differences as part of the diversity (Smith and Smith 2001). Different species concepts have been used in species richness studies (i.e., biological, ecological, evolutionary, and phylogenetic species concepts). An unified species concept has recently been proposed by de Queiroz (2007).
Description
The observed species richness is affected by the general area of sampling, heterogeneity of the habitat, trophic structure of the area, geographic region, and season of sampling. The species richness can vary considerably in different habitats,...
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Bibliography
Adams, J., 2009. Species Richness: Patterns in the Diversity of Life. New York: Springer Praxis Books.
Bower, J. E., and Zar, J. H., 1995. Field and Laboratory Methods for General Ecology. Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown Publishers.
Chao, A., 2005. Species richness estimation. In Balakrishnan, N., Read, C. B., and Vidakovic, B. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences. New York: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 7909–7916.
de Queiroz, K., 2007. Species concept and species delimitation. Systematic Biology, 56(6), 879–886.
Gotelli, N. J., and Colwell, R. K., 2001. Quantifying biodiversity: procedures and pitfalls in the measurement and comparison of species richness. Ecology Letters, 4, 379–391.
Maguran, A. E., 1988. Ecological Diversity and Its Measurement. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Smith, R. L., Smith T. M., 2001. Elements of ecology pearson education. In Addison Wesley Longman S. A. (eds.). Inc.
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Riosmena-Rodriguez, R., Andrade-Sorcia, G., Robinson, N.M. (2016). Species Richness. In: Kennish, M.J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Estuaries. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8801-4_266
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8801-4_266
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