There are all kinds of different ways to measure biodiversity. But if we are to arrest its alarming decline, biologists must agree on a method that best captures how it changes over time
“People often use the word biodiversity just to mean any characteristic of life out there that we might care to protect,” says, a biologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada. “That’s not a definition I find useful in science because if it’s everything, it’s nothing.”For biodiversity to be a valuable concept, he says, it needs to be a measure of biological variety.
The problem is that variety itself comes in many forms, especially in biology. “You can’t just come up with a single number for biodiversity in the same way as you can for carbon,” saysWe already have ways to measure biodiversity. That’s how we know it is in steep decline. They boil down to what biologists think of as dimensions of biodiversity. One of the most basic is species richness, which is simply the number ofin a given place at a given time.
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