Help needed: I need the communities help to better understand how to measure biodiversity in a standards way so that current state and change can be measured over time for any scale of terrestrial area. I have done some preliminary searches on Google scholar, and am aware of a few different indexes, but none of those I have found so far provides/generates the standardised indicator. The indicator I am interested in would simply provide some sort of rating for overall biodiversity in an area. It does not have to be exhaustive i.e. account accurately for every taxonomic groups and species. It just has to provide a standardized inference of the state of biodiversity at any one time or place. For example, the indicator could be related to a taxonomic group that would strongly infer biodiversity of (nearly) all other groups (bird diversity), or could sample representatives of all groups (would soil sampling e-DNA enable that? Any help you could give to point me in the right direction would be most appreciated.
It is important to note, for this, I am NOT interested in indicators that measure:
- Ecosystem function
- Ecosystem services
- Abundance/population size
Why: I am interested in stadardised measures of biodiversity change that could be used for any type of conservation project - to help conservationists set objectives for and report on biodiversity gain that their work contributes to.
