Measuring Biological Diversity

This accessible and timely book provides a comprehensive overview of how to measure biodiversity. The diversity of life on earth inspires fundamental ecological questions concerning the abundance of species and their distribution over space and time. The rapid loss of this diversity, primarily due to the impact of humanity, makes the need for effective ways of measuring biological diversity more important than ever.

As the successor to the author’s influential Ecological Diversity and its Measurement, this book has been completely rewritten to reflect the explosion of interest in biodiversity in the last fifteen years. The book highlights new developments, including innovative approaches to measuring taxonomic distinctness and estimating species richness, and evaluates these alongside traditional methods such as species abundance distributions, and diversity and evenness statistics.

Measuring Biological Diversity assumes no specialist mathematical knowledge and includes worked examples and links to web-based software. It will be essential reading for all students, researchers, and managers who need to measure biological diversity.