Measuring Biodiversity

Over the past several years, I've been privileged to be able to contribute the the Environmental Management Program at the Ridgetown Campus, University of Guelph. One of the fun things we do in March is to go to Clear Creek Nature Preserve and practice benthic monitoring using a 1m^2 kicknet and a 3 min. kick. Deb Hills and Sandy MacDonald get a day off from teaching and we practice some applied science in a living laboratory. Here's an Excel spreadsheet that calculates Simpson and Shannon biodiversity, and species richness and evenness StreamSamples22_03_07.xls The data values from that year are already there and can be overwritten, as well Family Biotic index can be derived from the Tolerance values.

If you want to get a better feel for the way biodiversity values are affected by populations, heres a toy spreadsheet that gives a better sense of they way this works.