ENWC314 Chapter 12: ENWC314 Chapter 12 book notes (Autosaved)

• School: University of Delaware
• Department: Entomology and Wildlife Conservation
• Course: ENWC314
• Professor: York Joanna

Document Summary

We can speak of genetic diversity within a species local adaptation of species to their environment. Species diversity is the more usual concept of biodiversity, and refers to the variety of species that are found in a community. Community and ecosystem biodiversity can also be measured as the diversity of ecological communities and ecosystems in a landscape. Simplest measure of biodiversity is to count the number of species or species richness. Species evenness how close in numbers each species in an environment is. One problem with counting the number of species as a measure of diversity is that it treats rare species and common species as equals. Ecologists have combined the concepts of number of species and relative abundance into a single concept of heterogeneity. Heterogeneity is higher in a community when there are more species and when the species are equally abundant.