What this Lesson Covers

Overview

So far in this course we have learned that several attributes can be measured to describe vegetation communities. These include:

• Density
• Frequency
• Cover
• Biomass

There are several ways that these individual attributes can be combined to create descriptive measures of plant communities. These include:

• Dominance
• Diversity
• Composition
• Similarity

This module overviews approaches and protocols that combine individual attributes to create a few commonly used measures to describe plant communities.

Learning Objectives

After this module you will be able to:

• Explain how individual measures of density, cover or biomass can be used to calculate composition of a plant community.

• Calculate and evaluate common values for biodiversity in plant communities.

• Describe the ways that diversity and dominance are used to evaluate plant communities.

• Understand how the similarity between plant communities can be used to assess and describe habitats.

• Explain the concept of a "referent" used in monitoring and assessment.