Chapter 4 – ASSESSMENT OF ANIMAL DIVERSITY

• There is no single all-embracing measure of

biodiversity – nor will there ever be one.
• Only biodiversity attributes are measurable.
• These attributes include:
1. Number and difference – this can be
Essentially through two components. They
are the number of entities; and the degree of
difference (dissimilarity) between those
entities.
2. Value - Differential value on that facet of the
variety of life.
 Chap. 4 contd.
3. Genetic diversity as a critical component -
determining nucleotide - strongest measures of
genetic diversity; there are also others which
rely up on DNA analysis.
4. Species richness as a common currency
 Species richness (The number of species per unit
area) - is the simplest way to describe community;
 regional diversity; forms the basis of many
ecological models of community structure.
Chapter 4 – contd.

 Practical application – highly reproducible

 Existing information – enormous literature
on species exists.
 Surrogacy - Species richness acts as a surrogate
measure for many other kinds of variation in
biodiversity
 Wide application - For a wide range of people,
variation in biodiversity is pictured as variation in
species richness.
 Chap. 4 contd.
• Diversity is different from species richness.
• Species richness is one attribute of diversity.
• Species richness tells us the number of species
per unit area; however, it does not tell us the
number of individuals in a given species.
• “Abundance” tells us the number of individuals
in a given species.
• There are several methods of measuring
abundance.
Importance of quantifying species richness
(why do we measure?)
• Basic comparisons among sites;
• addressing the saturation of local communities
colonized from regional source pools;
• Maximizing species richness for explicit or
implicit goal of conservation studies;
• current and background rates of species
extinction are calibrated against patterns of
species richness
 Chap. 4 contd.
• How can we measure abundance given that several
factors hinder to count all the individuals in a
species?
• Diversity indices are usually used to measure
abundance.
• However, it is also known that some species are
rare and individuals in such species are small in
number.
• To measure rare species there are methods known
as rarefaction.
• In the following sections we’ll see each of them.
 Chap. 4 contd
1. Measuring species richness
• Species richness is estimated from samples –
representation of population.
– Samples depend on the sample size – How many samples can
repents the whole population?
– Larger samples have more species.
– Some species are rare; some are abundant (so larger sample
size has high probability of picking both rare and abundant
species).
• Small samples have common species and few rare
species;
• Larger samples pick up more rare species.
 Richness
Richness metrics- include:
Richness (S) - Species richness: the total number of
species identified in the sample. It is among the
simplest descriptors of community structure.
1. Margalef diversity (SMargalef) - species richness
increases with N, and in particular increases non-
linearly and roughly logarithmically with N. SMargalef
= (S - I)/ In N
2. Menhinick diversity (SMenhinick ) - adjusting species
richness by the similarly shaped square root of N.
 Menhinick diversity (SMenhinick ) contd.

•
 2. Diversity Metrics
•
 Simpson diversity

•
 Evenness metrics (E)
• Evenness is a measure of how different the
abundances of the species in a community are
from each other.
• A community where every species had the
same abundance would be perfectly even.
• All natural communities are highly uneven, so
evenness is a relative statement. Most
evenness indices are scaled to approximately
run from 0 = maximally uneven to 1 = perfectly
even.
 Shannon evenness (J’ or EShannon )

• I f diversity is a mixture of richness and

evenness, then removing richness should
produce evenness.
• This is the logic behind Shannon's evenness
measure; the highest value of Dshannon when all
species are equally abundant can readily be
seen to be In(S) so dividing by In(S will give an
index from 0 to 1.
 Chap. 4 contd.
• So, when comparing the Species Richness of
two or more communities, you must correct
the estimate of Species Richness from samples
for differences in sample size (this is not
necessary where sample sizes are equal);
• The process of making the correction is called
Rarefaction.
• Let us take an example of three lakes in
Ethiopia:
 Fish species from three lakes
number per species of fish
Species Lake x Lake Z Lake Z
Table 1 A 92 0 8
B 3 0 12
C 5 23 9
D 4 43 9
E 6 63 0
F 6 25 1
G 9 20 80
H 0 23 4
I 0 0 4
J 1 0 4
K 0 0 0
L 3 0 0
 Chap. 4 Contd.
• Three problems are evident from Table 1, if the
objective of the study calls for comparison of
biodiversity of the three lakes:
1. The sample size are not equal;
2. The species number are not even;
3. Some species are rare and are difficult to
compare with more abundant species.
Therefore rearrangement and some mathematical
formulae are required to answer the question :
“which of the lakes has the most diverse species”?
 Chap. 4 Contd.
• Since it is known that no single way exists to measure
biodiversity we look into more ways by arranging the
indices into functional groups:
• Dominance Indices – dominance is a measure of how
much one or a few species dominate the community
numerically.
• adding lots of rare species will not increase the index's
value by much; Examples include:
1. Berger- Parker is the total number of individuals of all
species (N) divided by the number of individuals in the
most common species (Nmax).
2. Berger-Parker index is a relative index.
Where N = the total number of individuals of all species
Nmax = the number of individuals in the most common
species.
In this index, the addition of more rare species does not change
the denominator but will increase the numerator (in the
formulation above)
2. Simpson's index is simply the probability that any two
individuals chosen randomly from the total population come
from the same species. Each term of the summation is the
probability that two individuals chosen randomly will come
from a particular species and the summation gives the
probability for all species. This index can be used (as can all of
these indices) with measures of density involving biomass or
coverage area (from quadrat maps of vegetation - easy to get
now with satellite images). If there are S species and n i is the
number of individuals of the ith species and N is the total
number of individuals, then Simpson's index (which = 1 - D) is:
• Notice that D will get smaller as the diversity
of the community increases (if you keep N
constant and increase the number of species,
each ni must be smaller, on average, and so
the numerators get smaller).
• Simpson's index is normally expressed as 1/D
so that the index will increase as diversity
increases.
 Procedures in rarefaction
Rarefaction - Correction for bias in species
number due to unequal sample sizes by
standardization to the number of species
expected in a sample if it had the same total size
as the smallest sample.
Species Accumulation Curve
 How to measure species richness
There are two kinds of data used in richness
studies:
1. Incidence data - each species detected in a
sample from an assemblage is simply noted as
being present, and
2. abundance data - the abundance of each
species is tallied within each sample.
Note: abundance data can always be converted
to incidence data, but not the reverse.
 CHAPTER 5 METHODS IN ANIMAL DIVERSITY STUDIES

5.1. SCOPE
• depends on the basic definition of what to
measure.
•Dozens of biodiversity measures exist in
literature but they are out of the scope of this
course.
• Biodiversity measures depend on the
definition of Biological Diversity.
• Measured variables are representations of
features of biodiversity not biodiversity itself.
 ALPHA DIVERSITY

• Alpha diversity is the diversity of species

within an ecologicalcommunity, more
practically, “the species richness of standard
sample sites”, where “richness” is the number
of species in the community.
• Shannon Index:
 BETA DIVERSITY

• beta diversity measures the diversity of species among

communities
Whittaker’s mathematical measurement of beta diversity
is (β)=

Where, where S is the number of species in the entire set

of sites and α represents the average number of species
per site, with sites standardized to a common size.
 GAMMA DIVERSITY

• Gamma diversity refers to the diversity of

species across larger landscape levels.
• In measurable terms, gamma diversity is the
product of the alpha diversity of a landscape’s
communities and degree of beta
differentiation among them.
• Thus, the term gamma diversity is used to
denote the diversity of different kinds of
communities within a landscape.
 Gamma contd.
• Unlike beta diversity, gamma diversity is independent
of habitat and is calculated as

Where, D is the distance over which species turnover

occurs. G and l are respective rates of species gain and
loss.
• Gamma diversity is the rate of change of species
composition with respect to distance.
 Contnued.
• Specifically, they must clarify what feature of biodiversity is
being examined, what level of diversity is under
investigation, and what dimension of that level is being
evaluated.
LEVELS OF BIODIVERSITY:
In practical and legal application, the most useful unit of
biodiversity is most often that of species, which can be most
easily understood by the public and clearly defined in the
law. Other units of diversity, such as genetic, community,
and ecosystem diversity, also exist, and are sometimes
employed, depending on the conservation objective. Three
levels of diversity – alpha, beta, and gamma – are
recognized.