- Community Diversity (You can visit my educational YouTube channel Science World)
Ecologists have developed ways to characterize species diversity in a given area:
- Within-habitat diversity or alpha-diversity: refers to a group of organisms interacting and competing for the same resources or sharing the same environment. Measured as # of species within a given area.
- Between-habitat diversity or beta-diversity: refers to the response of organisms to spatial heterogeneity. High beta-diversity implies low similarity between species composition of different habitats. It is usually expressed in terms of similarity index between communities (or species turnover rate) between different habitats in same geographical area (often expressed as some kind of gradient).
- Geographical diversity or gamma-diversity: This term is used for the rate of turnover or replacement of species b/w similar habitat in different geographical areas. Such as difference in species. Diversity of habitat are the total landscape or geographical area is called GAMA DIVERSITY.
