Biodiversity Indexes

While biodiversity stands for the variety of life in the world or in a particular habitat or ecosystem, biodiversity indexes are the numerical representation of the biodiversity of an ecosystem.There are various different types of indexes but here are some of the most common ones:

1. Species richness (S) is the total number of subspecies found in an environment/sample per species.
2. Simpson's index (D) is the probability that two randomly selected individuals belong to two different species/categories. It assumes that the proportion of individuals in a area indicate their importance of diversity.
3. Shannon-Wiener index (H) is measuring the order/disorder in a particular system. This order is characterized by the number of individuals found for each species/category in the sample. A high species diversity may indicate a healthy environment.

Bibliography:
"Biodiversity indices." Virtue School Project. N.p., 17 Nov 2009. Web. 19 Aug 2010.