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Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth at any level of organization, from molecules to ecosystems. Thus, it includes all organisms and their populations, the genetic variation among them, and their complex assemblages into communities and ecosystems (Convention of Biological Diversity 1992). Biodiversity is therefore a multifaceted concept. Traditionally, biodiversity studies consider three forms of diversity: taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic. Taxonomic diversity (TD) includes the variety of species (or other systematic ranks) occurring at any scale and the differences in species composition among sites/areas. It can be measured in many ways, including alpha diversity (number of taxa within a particular site/area), beta diversity (the difference in species composition between sites/areas), and gamma diversity (the accumulated diversity from several sites) (Magurran 2004). Functional diversity(FD)...
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Borges, P.A.V., Gabriel, R., Fattorini, S. (2019). Biodiversity Erosion: Causes and Consequences. In: Leal Filho, W., Azul, A., Brandli, L., Özuyar, P., Wall, T. (eds) Life on Land. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71065-5_78-1
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