Question

How do you calculate the biodiversity of an ecosystem?

Answer 1

Hint: The ecologist has evaluated the number of methods to calculate the biodiversity of an ecosystem and this calculation requires the total number of species in an area and the total number of individuals in the area.

Complete answer:
Biodiversity term was put forth by Edward Wilson in 1992, according to him, biodiversity is the variety of life form present in our environment. Biodiversity is divided into three levels such as genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecological diversity. The ecologist has developed three different indexes for the calculation of biodiversity and this index is the Simpson index, Shannon index, and biodiversity index. The biodiversity index is most common to calculate the biodiversity of an ecosystem. Biodiversity index = the number of species in the area÷ number of individuals in the area.
The Shannon index = lnS where ln is the natural log and S is the total number of species, it evaluates species richness and evenness and it was given by Claude Shannon. whereas Simpson index is the probability of two individuals who get randomly selected from the same category and this was given by Edward. H. Simpson. The diversity index is also known as a phylogenetic index because it depends on the phylogenetic relationship of an individual which gets distributed based on its richness and diverseness.

Note:
It is not easy to calculate the total number of species or individuals in our ecosystem because some species are still yet to be discovered. The data we get on the biodiversity of an ecosystem is an average data based on the number of known species present in the particular habitats.