What Is Biodiversity? | Ecology & Environment | Biology | FuseSchool

Biodiversity is a key concept in ecology and has importance on both local and global scales. Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life, or, put more simply, the number of different individuals and lifeforms in an area.

Scientists usually measure biodiversity on either the genetic, species, or ecosystem levels. For example, if you wanted to measure the biodiversity of beetles on a global scale, you would find that there are over 350,000 known species of beetles on the planet. However, if you wanted to measure the biodiversity of beetles locally, you might only find 10 or 20 species. The reason for this difference is that biodiversity varies greatly with the location, habitat, and species being surveyed.