Biological diversity would apparently seem the most intuitive and easily studied of all the ecological concepts.However, in practice biodiversity has suffered from great number of definitions that vary with the specific needs of the different researchers, thus making it extremely confusing as an ecological concept. In this paper, I shortly review the concept of biodiversity showing that there exists a substantial ambiguity among ecologists as far as biodiversity conceptualization and evaluation is concerned. I conclude that, due to this major disagreement on its very nature, biodiversity may be defined simply as a set of multivariate summary statistics for quantifying different characteristics of community structure.
Through the jungle of biological diversity / Ricotta, Carlo. - In: ACTA BIOTHEORETICA. - ISSN 0001-5342. - STAMPA. - 53:1(2005), pp. 29-38. [10.1007/s10441-005-7001-6]
Through the jungle of biological diversity
RICOTTA, Carlo
2005
Abstract
Biological diversity would apparently seem the most intuitive and easily studied of all the ecological concepts.However, in practice biodiversity has suffered from great number of definitions that vary with the specific needs of the different researchers, thus making it extremely confusing as an ecological concept. In this paper, I shortly review the concept of biodiversity showing that there exists a substantial ambiguity among ecologists as far as biodiversity conceptualization and evaluation is concerned. I conclude that, due to this major disagreement on its very nature, biodiversity may be defined simply as a set of multivariate summary statistics for quantifying different characteristics of community structure.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
