A Guide to New Jersey Biodiversity - Ella Stastney

What is Biodiversity?
What are the different ways we can define biodiversity?
Biodiversity can be defined in a bunch of different ways.
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National Geographic defines biodiversity as:
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"the variety of living species on Earth, including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi"
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The American Museum of Natural History defines biodiversity as:
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"the variety of life on Earth at all its levels, from genes to ecosystems, and can encompass the evolutionary, ecological, and cultural processes that sustain life. "
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Ecology and Biodiversity defines biodiversity as:
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"a community’s biological community"
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How can we measure biodiversity?
According to Ecology and Biodiversity, biodiversity can be measured by both by species richness (the different species in this community) and species evenness (how much of each species there are). Here are some different indexes they discuss that are used to measure biodiversity:
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Simpson’s index is a formula used to calculate the probability that two species randomly selected in a given environment will be the same. The higher the number, the less diverse the ecosystem is.
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The Shannon-Wiener index is another formula used to calculate biodiversity. It is an uncertainty measure. The higher this number is, the more uncertain one is about which species they may select randomly, meaning the ecosystem is more diverse. This formula is useful since it takes into account the amount of the different species, as well as the different species in a certain ecosystem.
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Pielou’s index is another formula specifically used for species evenness (how similar the number of different species are in an environment). Higher values mean the ecosystem is more even.