Species Diversity - Synthetic Characters

It is one of the most important and basic characteristics of a community. There are various ways of measuring species diversity the simplest is to enumerate the number of species present in a given area. This is relatively easy to achieve for plants and large or sedentary animals but it is generally difficult to enumerate the various insect species accurately.

For large areas such as forests, islands etc., it may take many years to prepare a reasonable estimate of species numbers. Assessment of species diversity on the basis of species list is not fully satisfactory because drawing of an exhaustive and accurate species list is often an involved exercise. And, unless an elaborate exercise is undertaken there is a good possibility that a number of species may be left out. Since so many species in a sample are likely to be rare. We should not ignore this fact while measuring diversity. For example, compare two imaginary samples of 100 individuals each with two species A and B.