Biodiversity

Abstract Biodiversity is closely related to diversity. However, biodiversity has come to be concerned with the conservation of variation of different levels of biological organization, from genes to populations, communities, ecosystems, and landscapes. Biodiversity ranges across spatial and temporal scales. For the elements of concern (genes to landscapes), biodiversity can be measured as the number of different types of elements, the relative frequencies of the different elements, or the number of different processes such as gene flow or nutrient flow. This article emphasizes methods for conserving biodiversity. Biodiversity is rarely used in a sentence without the word ‘conservation’. When discussing biodiversity, it is assumed that high biodiversity is desirable and should be preserved. The arguments for conserving biodiversity are many and varied, from aesthetic to the stability of our environment to future cures for cancer and other uses of nature's raw biological material that cannot yet be imagined.