Publication details
Biodiversity: a Principle of Life in the Hands of Computational Science
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2007 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Proceedings of the 3rd Internationl Summer School on Computational Biology |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Ecology |
| Keywords | biodiversity; diversity indices; species-abundance models; niche-oriented models |
| Description | This paper has been prepared to provide a brief educational overview of biodiversity data as a subject of different types of studies. The biodiversity is defined in all levels of organization of biological systems, from molecular and genomic level to ecosystem scale. A special attention is given to the methodology of different types of analyses, including the widely-used modeling of species-abundance relationships. The analysis of biodiversity is widely available in many software packages and hundreds of measures can be used; however, it must always be done with a very careful and correct interpretation. Several key numerical principles underlying large families of biodiversity measures are explained. These are so-called Shannons concept of biodiversity, principle of dominance, principle of evenness, species-abundance cumulative profiles and niche-oriented modeling. The paper concludes that the remarkable specifics of biodiversity data and biodiversity itself make this field extremely challenging for computational science, including computer-assisted simulations and modern data mining techniques. |
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