olichka wrote:
Is biodiversity only about biological variation within and among species? Or should we also consider other levels of variation such as ecosystem or genetic? Do we really know what biodiversity means?
Hi, bio = life, thence biodiversity = diversity of life. But what is life? Isn't it something like fractal of system hierarchies starting from intracellular molecular machinery and ending with an entire biosphere, with genes, species, habitats, landscapes, communities, ecosystems, biomes in between. All related via a large variety of feedback loops, upward and downward causation (omnicausality) between different hierarchical levels: species <-> ecosystem, individual <-> population, etc. But where exactly does it start and where does it end ?.. We have to admit - there is no strict definition of life yet.
Can we measure biodiversity using a single measure? No, like no one is able to measure amount of meaning in a book. But we can measure species richness, information content (~complexity), alpha, beta, gama biodiversity coefficients. Although none of these measures will ever estimate all aspects of what we call biodiversity. The holistic context of diversity of life is too complex to measure or estimate with any single reductionist measure.
Therefore some of us would like to see biodiversity informatics as a broader concept (informatics of life) integrating bioinformatics (exploring genetic patterns), ecoinformatics (ecological patterns), geoinformatics (well, habitat patterns from a point of view of life scientist
), medical informatics (we are alive, we are species, we are populations, aren't we?..).
