The Land Tells the Story

Each species—no matter how small—has an important role to play in a functioning ecosystem. They all participate in various ecosystem processes like transferring energy, providing nutrient storage, or breaking down pollutants. That is why biological diversity, or biodiversity, is a benchmark for measuring the health of an ecosystem. Biodiversity can be measured two ways: the number of different species (also called richness) and the abundance of each species (also called evenness).