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22: Biodiversity

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    Learning Objectives

    • Differentiate among the types of biodiversity

    • Learn how to measure diversity using indices

    • Understand why biodiversity is not evenly distributed

    • Learn how rarefaction curves are used to estimate species richness

    Summary

    Genetic diversity, ecosystem diversity, and human-derived diversity are measures of biodiversity that currently define life on earth. Because it is often difficult to obtain a full list of species in any given location, various metrics are used to measure biodiversity, including Alpha, Beta, and Gamma diversity, and rarefaction curves. While around 2 million species have been scientifically described globally, estimates of the actual number of species on earth range from 10s of millions to billions.

    22: Biodiversity is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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