Lecture 10- Measuring Biodiversity Flashcards
Why do we monitor biodiversity? (Three)
- The understand how populations change in response to stress
- Understand species response to specific interactions
- Assess whether the recovery of species is effective
How is biodiversity measured? Why is it measured like this?
Biodiversity is measured via:
- The number of genes, species and ecosystem interactions or
- Processes: interspecific competition, interactions, nutrient cycles etc
Explain how the impacts of climate change on Dendrobates is measured
- Climatic factors controlling vegetation ectones and patters of species richness across the region
- Habitat availability and landscape linkage
- Climatic controls on regional and local disturbance regimes
- Physiological tolerance of individual species
- Dispersal capacities of individual species
- Genetic variation between different populations of the same species
What are the three conceptual aspects of biodiversity?
- Structural diversity
- Compositional diversity
- Functional diversity
What is structural diversity?
Physical organisation or patterns, such as habitat complexity
What is compositional diversity
Identify and richness(eg. Species or phylogenetic diversity)
What is functional diversity?
Ecological and evolutionary processes (eg. Gene flow, nutrient cycling)
What are measurements of biodiversity a function of?
Scale
What makes an effective biodiversity indicator? (8 points)
- Sensitive enough to detect change
- Widget distributed
- Provides continuous measurements over a wide range of stressors/time
- Results/reactions are in dependant of sample size
- Easy to measure
- Cheap to measure
- Relevant to the current threat/ecological issue
- Easy to differentiate responses to natural vs anthropogenic change
What three factors makes birds and beetles good indicator species?
- We’ll studied (so responses are known
- Preform many ecological functions (so disturbances are visible)
- Cheap to measure
What is resolution and what does it vary across?
- The level of detail required in the data, is a function of: scale and precision
What are the four different ways of analyses:
- Time series
- Spatial statistics (eg. Jacquard index)
- Indices
- Comparisons
Why are birds and butterfly’s good indicators of change in conservation? (Five reasons)
- Natural rare, meaning notable response to change
- Habitat specialists
- Performed important ecosystem functions (so disturbances will be visible)
- “Normal” behaviour is well studied
- Charismatic species
What is a generalist species?
One that can exist in a variety of habitats
What two factors is conservation “useless” without?
Knowledge of species location and abundance