WILDSPOTS FOUNDATION

2007 INTERNATIONAL BIODIVERSITY CONFERENCE

16-21 June 2007

Baños, Ecuador

MEASURING BIODIVERSITY

Edward O. Keith, Ph.D.

Oceanographic Center

Nova Southeastern University

Ft. Lauderdale, FL

A comprehensive understanding of biodiversity is difficult because of the multidimensional nature of the concept. When it comes to measuring biodiversity, terrestrial and freshwater plants and vertebrates have retained a disproportionate hold on the attention of scientists over the past two centuries. However, distilling biodiversity to a few dimensions or even a single universally applicable index is problematic. Complementarily and taxonomic distinctness have been used to maximize biodiversity representation in terrestrial, but not marine, conservation planning. Trends in biodiversity have been detected in both terrestrial and marine systems. Complete inventories of organisms are impractical because there are far too many for direct enumeration. Hierarchical ecological frameworks that separate biodiversity into compositional, structural, and functional attributes at the genetic, population, community-ecosystem, and landscape levels of organization are thus entering into use. Molecular techniques are becoming more important in measuring terrestrial and marine genetic biodiversity, creating the need for new approaches to biodiversity informatics to manage and apply such rapidly expanding biodiversity data.