Examples Of Ecosystem Diversity

3. Ecosystem diversity:-

Ecosystem diversity refers to the range of life forms in a given terrain or locale and the ecological processes that make them function. Ecosystem diversity is often evaluated through measures of the diversity of the constituent species, the relative abundance of different species as well as contemplation of the type of species. Ecosystem is the amalgamation of communities of living things with the physical environment in which they live. Ecosystem diversity is the array of biological communities, such as forests, deserts, grasslands and streams that interact with one another and with their physical and chemical (nonliving) environments. Each ecosystem provides much different kind of habitat or living places providing

Boundaries are, of course, most noticeable when there are major differences in the abiotic environment (for example lakes versus grasslands) and certainly some terrestrial ecosystems still extend over very large areas of the planet, for example savannah and tropical rainforests. Nevertheless, species abundance and species composition within these ecosystems always varies temporally and spatially. The population dynamics of species create temporal heterogeneity, while gradients in abiotic variables lead to spatial heterogeneity (Whittaker 1975) often over orders of magnitude (Thomas Elmqvist et. al, 2010, Ettama and Wardle

Alpha diversity and gamma diversity can be viewed as expressions of a continuum of floristic composition at different spatial scales. However, practitioners have struggled to provide a consistent set of tools for operating these measures to describe vegetation diversity from the regional to local level. It is commonly understood that a sequence of terms such as alpha, beta, and gamma represents some form of series, a numerical‖ gradient or a ranked gradient, where the ranking reflects a gradient of categories. Generally, in science, such a ranking proceeds from the large scale down to the small scale, or vice versa. The sequence of Greek letters, alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, etc., is often used in science as adjectival descriptors to designate gradients, sequences, and series (Vic Semeniuk and Ian David, 2013).

Alpha diversity can be quantified in numerous ways. One is richness, which is defined as the number of species in a particular area or ecosystem (Magurran, 1988). Though useful (Hurlbert, 1971), the interpretation of richness is not always straight forward because it depends on sample size (Peet, 1974). A second index of alpha diversity is evenness measures; these indicate how the individuals in a community are distributed among species, and abundance or heterogeneity