Community Characteristics-I

2.     Species Richness

Species Richness is given as number of species in a community. In an ecological habitat, landscape or community the count of different species represents the species richness. It does not indicate about the species abundance or relative abundance of species. For example beetles counted from a pitfall trap etc. Sample heterogeneity and the number of species influence the species richness. If the samples are collected from different environment and habitats then the collected data is higher for species richness. Thus sampling should be performed on large areas as the more heterogeneous environment prevails and large size of population.

Applications

Species richness helps in assessing the conservation values of landscapes or habitat by relative comparisons. Although it does not consider the type of species but areas with rare species have higher conservation values than same number of species which are commonly found.