Diversidad alfa, beta y gamma: cómo medimos diferencias entre comunidades biológicas
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Abstract
Biological diversity is not uniformly distributed across the globe: different places harbour different biological species, and in different numbers. A key question is, therefore, how to measure biodiversity in order to understand the processes that generate it and thus to be able to protect it efficiently. A standard framework posits that biological diversity can be measured at the local level (alpha diversity) or at the regional level (gamma diversity), and that that ratio between both (gamma / alpha) is beta diversity, which accounts for the differences among the local biological communities that are present in the region. However, those differences can derive from two phenomena that need to be distinguished: the replacement among sites of some species by others, or (ii) the loss of species from more diverse to less diverse sites. Separating these two components of beta diversity is crucial to understand how biological diversity is distributed, how different biological communities are, and what the causes of these differences are.
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References
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