The measurement of species diversity provides an important preliminary assessment of overall biodiversity. There are many ways by which species diversity is measured i.e. species richness, taxonomic diversity, taxonomic uniqueness and species -diversity indices.
This is the most widely used measure of species diversity. In simple terms it is a count of the total number of species in a given area. It gives equal weightage to all species and does not take into account the number of individuals that represent a particular species. A large number of individuals of a single species will result in greater genetic diversity, and thus positively influence overall biodiversity. Complete counts of species richness of an area are rarely possible, so that the measure of species richness is often based on sampling smaller representative sites within the area to be assessed. Accuracy of sampling is thus important in estimating species richness of a given area.