Measuring Plant Diversity: Lessons from the Field

Ecologists interested in assessing landscapes and ecosystems must measure biomass, cover, and the density or frequency of various key species. Recently, sampling designs for measuring species richness and diversity, patterns of plant diversity, species-environment relationships, and species distributions have become fine-grained, as it has become increasingly important to accurately map and assess rare species for conservation. This book lays out the range of current methods for mapping and measuring species diversity, for field ecologists, resource managers, conservation biologist, and students, as a tool kit for future measurements of plant diversity.

Thomas J. Stohlgren is Invasive Species Science Branch Chief, U.S. Geological Survey Fort Collins Science Center, and Senior Scientist and Affiliate Faculty Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University.