Environmental (topography, climate) features have an important influence on plant diversity and richness of Iran. Topography is from –28m which is close to Caspian Sea to 5678m which is located on the Alborz Mountain. Two mountains (Alborz and Zagrosss) prevent moist air moving to the centre of Iran. On the basis of environmental factors, four ecological zones with specific plant richness from ...

The Improved Generalized Diversity Index (IGDI) has been proposed as a tool that can be used to identify areas that have high conservation value and measure the ecological condition of an area. IGDI is based on the species relative abundances. This paper is concerned with particular attention is given to comparisons involving the MacArthur model of species abundances. The properties and perform...

Diversity is a fundamental, yet threatened, property of ecological systems. The idea that diversity can itself favour diversification, in an autocatalytic process, is very appealing but remains controversial. Here, we study a generalized model of ecological communities and investigate how the level of initial diversity influences the possibility of evolutionary diversification. We show that eve...

This document explains diversity related methods in vegan. The methods are briefly described, and the equations used them are given often in more detail than in their help pages. The methods discussed include common diversity indices and rarefaction, families of diversity indices, species abundance models, species accumulation models and beta diversity, extrapolated richness and probability of ...

Understanding the effects of intraspecific genetic diversity on the structure and functioning of ecological communities is a fundamentally important part of evolutionary ecology and may also have conservation relevance in identifying the situations in which genetic diversity coincides with species-level diversity.Early studies within this field documented positive relationships between genetic ...

Paleoecological records are replete with examples of biotic responses to past climate change and human impact, but how can we use these records in the conservation of current and future biodiversity? A recently published list of (One Hundred Questions of Importance to the Conservation of Global Biological Diversity) (Sutherland et al., 2009) highlights a number of key research questions that ne...