Abstract
Plant biodiversity is defined by the variety in all the plant-taxonomic categories (species, genera, families, orders, etc.) and by the variety of ecosystems and plant communities to which they belong (Wilson 1992). One may distinguish the following levels of biodiversity, according to a hierarchy of increasing spatial extent: α – diversity (number of species present in a single community, or local species richness); β – diversity (variation in the number of species along an environmental or geographic gradient); γ – diversity (number of species present in a relatively wide area, or regional species richness); and δ – diversity (number of species present on a continent). The study of biodiversity today constitutes a principal theme in conservation biology (Primack 2002; Blasi 2005; Poldini 2009) and is at the center of a grand theoretical and practical discussion about environmental implications and the survival of species. In this chapter we introduce briefly some aspects relative to the possibility of mapping biodiversity.
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Pedrotti, F. (2013). Mapping Plant Biodiversity. In: Plant and Vegetation Mapping. Geobotany Studies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30235-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30235-0_11
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